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Incarnations Of The Murderer

William T. Vollmann

San Ignacio, Belize (1990)
San Francisco, California U.S.A.. (1991)
Agra, India (1990)
San Francisco, California U.S.A. (1991)
Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island,
Northwest Territories, Canada (1991)
Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)
Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

San Ignacio, Belize (1990)

Two girls sailed under the fat green branches of trees that curved like eyebrows. At the top of the grassy bank, a plantain spread its leaves across the clouds. They passed little brown girls swimming and smiling. They passed a man who dove for shrimp that he put in a plastic bag. Breasting the painted houses that were grocery stores rich with onions. Coca-Cola and condensed milk, they rode the wide brown river between tree- ridges and palm houses.

As they paddled, the plump wet thighs of the girls quivered; water danced on their thighs. A few wet curly hairs peeked shyly from the crotches of their bathing suits. They had golden hourglass waists.

A man was a dragonfly. He hugged his shadow on the river until he saw them.

The water splashed under a great green tree-bridge that grew parallel to the water. Its branches were red and black like the skin of a diamondback rattler. In the branches crouched the man. The plan that the man had was as rubbery and pink as a monkey’s palm. But the canoe was not there yet. The two girls were still alive.

Yellow butterflies skimmed low across the shallow water. They saw the girls, too. They saw each other. They saw themselves in the water and forgot everything.

The tree that owned the water was closer now. A white horse sneezed in a grove of golden coconuts.

All morning the man had been thinking of the two girls whom he was about to kill. Knocking yellow coconuts down from the trees with a big stick, he’d sliced away at them with his machete until a little hole like a vagina appeared. He put his mouth to that pale bristly hole and drank. (Slowly, the white meat inside oxidized brown.) But now he was silent, suspended from his purpose as if by the heavy supple tail of a spider monkey.

Now the two girls passed little clapboard houses with laundry out to dry. They passed the last house they would ever see. In the river a lazy boa was wriggling along. That was the last snake they’d ever see.

They went down the ripple-stained river, the ripple-striped river. They saw the broad green rocks beneath the water, the soft yellow-green tree-mounds. They came to the tree of their death, and the man jumped down lightly and stabbed them in their breasts.

The canoe lay long and low across the neck of an island. Reflected water burned whitely on its keel.

The man opened red fruits. He bit them. They were soft with two-colored grainy custard inside.

The spice of the blood was like the sweet stinging of the glossy-leaved pepper-tree, whose orange fruits burn your lips when you eat, burn again when you piss. This made him happy. He went to sleep and awoke. A toucan chirped like a frog. The taste was stronger in his mouth. He laughed.

He wandered among the caring arches of the palm tree that shaded him like wisdom, and his shirt was hot and slick on his back. He came to the grove where the white horse had sneezed and knocked down a coconut. He drank the juice, but the taste of blood was even stronger now. He looked sideways in the hot high fields of trees.

Knuckles itching pleasantly with insect bites, searching through the wild-looking fields for ground foods with the sun hot on his sunburned neck and wrists, he swiped down a sugarcane stalk with his machete and then he skinned and peeled it in long strokes, from green down to white. He was good at using knives. He snapped off a piece and chewed it, tasting in advance its taste so juicy, fresh and sweet. His hands were sticky with juice. He chewed. But the other taste loomed still more undeniable.

Between his teeth he placed slices of young pineapple, bird- eaten custard apples, bay leaves, green papayas, sour plums from a leaf-bare tree. He bit them all ferociously into a mush. Then he sucked, choked, swallowed. Building a fire, he made coffee, which he drank down to the grounds. He cut an inch of medicine- vine and chewed that bitterness, too. The taste of blood increased.

He spat, but his spittle was clear. There was no blood in it. He pricked his tongue with the point of the knife, but his own male blood could not drown the other, the female taste.

He drank half a bottle of rum and fell down. All around him, trees steamed by humid horizons. When he awoke, the taste was stronger than ever. He began to scream.

There was a cave he knew of whose floor was a sandy beach. The man ran there without knowing why. Jet black water became black and green there as it descended into bubbling pools close enough to the entrance to reflect the jungle, from the branches of which the black and orange-tailed birds hung like seedpods. The widest tree-boughs were festooned with vine-sprouts like the feathered shafts of arrows. Behind them, where it was cool and stale, the cave’s chalky stalactites hung in ridge-clusters like folds of drying laundry on a line. The man ran in. He splashed through the first pool. It was alive with green and silver ripples intersecting with one another like a woman’s curls. A single bubble traveled, white on black, then silver on silver. He ran crazy through the next pool. Farther in the darkness was a chalky beach, cratered with rat-prints and raccoon-prints. This was the place where the cave-roof was crowned by a trio of stalactites. Here, where everything but the river was quiet, a pale whitish bird fluttered from rock to rock, squeaking like a mouse. The bird flew back and forth very quickly. It hovered over rock-cracks’ wrinkled lips. It landed on a crest of lighter-colored rock like a wave that had never broken. It darted its beak between two studs of shell-fossil and swallowed a blind ant. Then it departed into deeper caves within the cave, floored with silence and white sand. Water shimmered white on black rocks–

The man opened his mouth to scream again and the white bird came from nowhere. The white bird was the soul of one on the girls. The bird stabbed the man’s tongue with its beak and drank blood. Then it flew away, not squeaking anymore.

The man swallowed experimentally. The taste was not nearly so strong.

Farther back in the cave was a pit. A tiny black bird flew there. Knowing this now, the man clambered down. It was like being inside a seashell. Far down in the well, the flicker of his lighter showed him the pink and glistening rock-guts. Smoke streamed from the little lighter like a beam from a movie projector. He held the lighter below his mouth, so that the black bird could see him. The bird came swooping down and cheeping. It was so tiny that it flew back between his tonsils. He longed to swallow it, to recapitulate his triumphs. But then the taste would strengthen again. The black bird pierced him and drank a drop of his blood. He could feel the bird’s pulse inside him. It was not much bigger than a bee. It took him again. Then it flew away in silence.

The taste was gone now. The man shrieked with glee. The cave was empty.

Outside, it was so brightly green that the hunger of his eyes (which he hadn’t even known that he had) was caught: as long as he looked out upon it, he thought himself satisfied, but the instant he began to look away, back into the darkness, then his craving for greenness screamed out at him.

He ran outside trying to see and taste everything. He ran down the streambank to a kingdom of pools in bowls of baking hot rock. He drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sandvalleys, green-slicked boulder cliffs: he grabbed at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. In the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, eating each other’s soft flesh.

San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

Down the fog-sodden wooden steps he came that night to the street walled with houses, every doorway a yellow lantern-slide suspended between floating windows, connected to earth by the tenuous courtesy of stairs. Earth was but sidewalk and street, a more coagulated grey than the silver-gleam of reflected souls in car windshields, heavier too than the grey-green linoleum sky segmented by power wires. He went fog-breathing while the two walls of houses faced each other like cliffs, ignoring one another graciously; they were long islands channelled, coved and barred, made separate by the crisscrossing rivers of grey streets. Somewhere was the isle of the dead girls’ canoe, which he needed now to get away from himself. All night he walked the hill streets until he came to morning, a foggy morning in the last valley of pale houses before the sea. He stood before an apartment house whose chessboard-floored arch declined to eat him as he’d eaten others; the doors were shut like the sky. The curving ceiling of the arch was stamped with white flowers in squares. Black iron latticed windows as elaborately as Qur’anic calligraphy; white railings guarded balconies. Spiked lamps smoldered at him from behind orange glass. Timidly he hid behind the sidewalk’s trees whose leaf-rows whispered richly down like ferns . . .

Once he admitted that this house was not for him, he turned away from all hill streets side-stacked with rainbow cars and went down further toward the sea. So he came to the street of souls.

The candy shop of souls lured him in first. His nose stung with the fog. He opened the door and went in, staring at the long glass case that was like an aquarium. Here he found the chocolate ingots, the pure mint-striped cylinders, the tarts studded with fruits and berries like a dozen orchards, the vanilla bread-loaves long and slender like suntanned eels, the banana-topped lime hexagons, the chocolate-windowed eclairs domed with cream like Russian Orthodox churches, the round strawberry tortes gilded with lemon-chocolate to make pedestals for the vanilla-chocolate butterflies that rested on each with breathless wings, the sponge-cakes like an emperor’s crown, the complex wicker-basket raspberry pies of woven crust, heaped with boulders of butter and confectioner’s sugar, the tins of violet lozenges, the bones and girders made of licorice, the low white discs of sugarpies topped with fan-swirls of almonds like playing cards, the peach cakes, pear cakes, the row of delectable phosphorescent green slugs, the flowerpot of coffee frosting from which a chocolate rose bloomed, the strawberries that peaked up from unknown tarts and tortes bride-bashful behind ruffled paper–

He sat at a little square marble table, and without a word the lady brought him a green slug, served on a white plate with white lace. He reached in his pocket and found a single coin of iron with a hole in the center. He gave her that. He sat looking past the glass case at the rows of fruit confections in matched white-lidded jars–not for him. With the silver fork he stabbed the slug and raised it into his mouth, where it overcame him between his teeth with a sweet ichor of orgasmic limes, and so he became a thief–

Agra, India (1990)

Two green-clad soldiers were striking a man in the face beneath one of the side-arches of the Taj Mahal. The man was not screaming. He was a thief. The soldiers had caught him, and were beating him. All around him, the Mughal tombs bulged with hard nipples on their marble breasts. — The Emperor, he had so many wives, he spent a month’s salary on cosmetics! cried the guide.

Blood flowered from the thief’s nose.

This tower closed now, said the guide. The lovely boys and girls jump off, suicide. For love and love and love. Closed now for security reason. But this part, this open ivory day.

The thief fell down when they let go of him. The soldiers stamped on his stomach. Then they raised him again.

Now. sir, lady, come-come. Look! This marble one piece. No two piece. No join. Only cutting!

The thief looked at the guide with big eyes. The soldiers punched him. Then he was not looking at the guide anymore. Sir and lady went away, trying not to hear his groans as the soldiers began to beat him. They wore the dead girl’s mouths.

Yes, please! Hello! Sir and madam!

(Sir and madam were staring at him again. They could not help it. The soldiers were kicking out his teeth.)

Water rippled in long grooves of onyx, malachite, coral. Clouds echoed between the lapis-flowered marble screens. Far beyond the screens lay dim white-grey corridors of peace. Darkness, incense and shadows crawled slowly on marble, searching for secret sweet-smelling vaults.

The soldiers hustled the thief into darkness.

Outside it was a foggy morning. Skinny men rode bicycles, with dishtowels wrapped around their heads. Roadside people squatted by smudges to keep warm. On the dusty road that stank of exhaust, platoons of dirty white cattle were marched and goaded toward Agra. They had sharp backbones and floppy bellies.

Postcards, please? Small marble! Elephant two rupees!

Cowtails and buttocks were crowded together long narrow and wobbly like folded drapes. They swished and twitched as if they were alive and knew where they were going, but they didn’t; they only followed where they were pulled, like the thief being led into the recesses of that gorgeous tomb.

San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

When the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up Nob Hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up Powell Street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. Crowds were standing off the curb. There was no room for them yet. He saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. Globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of Union Square. Higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the Chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of Victorian houses. A girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. At the top of the hill he could see far; he saw a Sunday panorama off the Marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coolers, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the Golden Gate Bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from Alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. The red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. The cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-four- footer tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison bouys that say KEEP OFF; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: If I can’t eat them by stealing them, I’ll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls.

Fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls.

Brass safe deposit boxes walled him, side by side, bearing buttons and horns. Each one had a different coffee inside. The smell of coffee enflamed him. There were rows of stalls for muffins, each of which reminded him of the pale brown coconuts he had drunk. In his pocket he found a single coin with a hole in it. They gave him a muffin. He became an anthropologist.

Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada

(1991)

On the komatik, whose slats had been partly covered by a caribou skin (now frozen into iron wrinkles), he lay comfortably on his side, gripping two slat-ends with his fishy-smelling sealskin mitts which were already getting ice-granules behind the liner (an old bedsheet) because every time he wiped his nose with the skintight capilene gloves the snot was soaked up by the old bedsheet which then began to freeze; and as the komatik rattled along at the end of its leash, making firm tracks in the snow- covered ice, the wind froze the snot around his nose and mouth into white rings, but not immediately because it was not cold enough yet to make breath-frost into instant whiskers; however, it was certainly cold enough to make his cheek ache from contact with the crust of snot-ice on the ski mask; meanwhile the smoothness of the sea began to be interrupted by hard white shards where competing currents had gashed the ice open and then the wound had scarred; sometimes the ice-plates had forced each other’s edges into uprising splinters that melded and massed into strange shapes; the Inuk wended the skidoo between these when he could, going slowly so that the komatik did not lurch too badly; his back was erect, almost stern, the rifle at a ready diagonal, and he steered south toward a thick horizon-band that seemed to be fog or blowing snow; in fact it was the steam of open water. Over this hung the midday sun, reddish-pale, a rotten apple of the old year.

Then the groaning ice fissured into a shape like a girl’s mouth, and the komatik broke through. He fell under the ice. The other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his blood and he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him so lovingly and he was warmed. The first girl, the one who was ice, opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through to the sky.

Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)

Grey-lit struts took his weight as he shot across the bridge; flat grey-green ribs were stripped of their nightflesh by the dingy lights, the lights of Oakland rippling in between like scales, inhuman lights all the way to the grey horizon. What a relief when the world finally ran out of electricity, and we’d have to turn them off! On his left was a city of stacks and towers clustered with lights like sparks that could never be peacefully extinguished, could never cool themselves in the earth. A gush of smoke blew horizontally from the topmost stack. He scuttled up greenish-grey ramps of deadness into the dead night, accompanied by characterless strings of light, dull apartment tower lights, dark bushes; he bulleted down a lane of dirty blackness clouded by trees on either side, remnant trees suffered to live only because they interrupted that ugly terrible light. Then he came into the outer darkness of unhealthy tree- mists where the sky was as empty as his heart. He slid like a shuffleboard counter through the cut between blackish-brownish- grey banks of darkness, the sky greenish-grey above. He crossed the grim vacuous bridge that was the last place before the night country; he pierced the turgid black river (so night-soaked that he could perceive it only at its edges where light coagulated upon black wrinkles) and came into the ruined desert.

The toll bar came down. The attendant was waiting. Cars were beginning to honk behind him as he sat there at the toll booth of souls, looking through his pockets. Finally he found a single coin with a hole in it. He reached, dropped it into the attendants palm. The toll bar went up. He became a piece of jute cloth.

Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

A woman in a mask who had a blue blanket over her head put the soft limp jute of him onto the conveyor belt. Then he got washed and rolled. The rollers gleamed and worked him back and forth, softening him. He could not scream. To her he was not even a shadow. (A poster of the president changed rose-light on its shrine.) What worked the rollers? The factory had its own generator, its own grand shouting alternators, built to last, 237 kilowatts . . . The jute of his soul got matted and soft. He did not see the hammer-and-sickle flag anymore. His soul got squeezed by a rickety rattling. Now he was squished almost as thin as a hair. People dragged him away slowly, pulling long bunches of him with both hands. He was in a vast cement-floored enclosure whose roof was stained brown. They stretched him out. Slowly he went up a long steep conveyor. He emerged in a pale white roll of hope, twirling down, narrowing into a strip. The barefoot workers gathered him into piles on the concrete floor, then stuffed him into barrels, which were then mounted on huge reels. Murderers like him had destroyed this place once already. There had been twelve hundred workers. Now that it had been rebuilt, eight hundred and sixty worked there, eight hours a day, six days a week, not knowing that jute was souls. They cleaned and pressed him into accordioned ribbons of fiber that built up in the turning barrels. A masked girl stood ready to pack him down with her hands and roll a new barrel into place. He recognized her. She was not angry anymore. Then someone took the barrels to go into a second pressing machine. A metal arm whipped back and forth, but only for a minute; the barefoot girls had to fiddle with it again. His substance was cleaned and dried. A masked woman lifted up levers, twisted him by hand into the clamps, pulled down levers, and he spilled out again. He recognized her, too. She smiled at him. Now everyone could see him being woven into string, dense, rough and thick; this string in turn was woven into sacking. They were going to fill his empty heart with rice. This is not such a bad destiny for anyone, since rice is life. The barefoot girls teased out the rolls of soul-cloth, gathering them from the big roll in different sizes (63 x 29 inches and 20 x 98 inches); boys dragged them across the floor at intervals, stretching, looking around, slowly smoothing them amidst the sounds of the mechanical presses. So they stacked him among the other sacks. Girls sat on sacks on the floor, sewing more sacks; they were fixing the mistakes of the sack-sewing machine. Then they pressed the sacks into bales. But he’d turned out perfect; he did not need any girls to stitch up the holes in his heart. He was ready now in the bale of sacks. If someone guarded him well he might last two years. Then he’d turn to dirt. A man’s hands seized his bale and carried him toward the place where he would be used. Then the man’s work-shift was over. The man went to serve his hours on the factory militia, readying himself for duty in the room of black guns on jute sacks. The man knew that in the jungle other murderers were still nearby.

September 25, 2013
Great Breakthroughs In Darkness (Being, Early Entries From the Secret Encyclopaedia Of Photography)

Marc Laidlaw

Chief Secretary of the Ministry of
Photographic Arcana, Correspondent of No
Few Academies, Devoted Husband, &c.

Authorized by Marc Laidlaw

[Previously published in England as part of New Worlds 2, ed. David Garnett (Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1992).]

“Alas! That this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced into a modern novel or romance; for what a denouement we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper!”

— William Henry Fox Talbot

-A-

Aanschultz, Conreid

(c. 1820 – October 12, 1888)

Inventor of the praxiscope technology (which see), Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject’s thoughts. (Later researchers demonstrated that the device “functioned” by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) Aanschultz’s theories collapsed, and the Professor himself died in a Parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the Belgian countryside near Waterloo. Some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator’s brain. However, there is evidence that Aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster.

Aanschultz Lens

The key lens used in Aanschultz’s notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject’s eye.

Abat-Jour

A skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. In the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, I found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society’s (and my own) madness and disease. It was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and Aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm.

I came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. My own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that I could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. At night I wore a woman’s long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (60 g.), carbolic acid (10 ccs), zinc oxide (30 g) and lanoline (480 “), which I had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. I had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. I dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one’s face, I am told, there is a pleasant numbness)–but so far this nightmare had not developed. Still, I held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin Janssen photographic revolvers which I carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing “gun” which first captured the transit of Venus across the face of our local star.

The laboratory, I say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. Despite my admiration for the Professor’s efficiency, I found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. But Aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. He would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. I had suggested a more oblique light, but the Professor would not hear of it.

“That is for your prissy studios–for your fussy bourgeois sitters!” he would rage at my “aesthetic” suggestions. “I am a man of science. My subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight–I observe the whole man here.” To which I replied: “And yet you have not captured him. You have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. The fleeting things you see cannot be captured. Which is less than I can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial.” And here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that I knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope.

He needed lasting records of his studies–some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope’s pictures in place for all to see, for all time. It was this magical medium which he now sought. I thought it must be something of a “Deep” paper–a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. When he shared his own ideas, I quickly became lost, and if I made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. I could not follow Aanschultz’s arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. Only another genius could follow where Aanschultz went in his thoughts. With time I had even stopped looking in his eyes–with or without a psychopraxiscope.

“I am nearly there,” he told me today, as I reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand.

“You’ve found a way to fix the psychic images?”

“No–something new. My life’s work. This will live long after me.”

He said the same of every current preoccupation. His assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. Their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. In the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. There was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. I had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until I could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great Professor Conreid Aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. He courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. I finished it off and dropped it in a half- assembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. The Professor made use of all Things.

“This way,” he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. The proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning Bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and I was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. Here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. I sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to Aanschultz’s actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. I doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as Aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. I myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend’s urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit–a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. For poor Aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. His was a world of constant Discovery.

I bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally I found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. Blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. My skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. Things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light.

“Here we are,” he said. “This will make everything possible. This is my—

Abat-Nuit

By this name Aanschultz referred to a bevelled opening he had cut into an odd corner of the room, a tight and complex angle formed between the floor and the brick abutment of a chimney shaft from the floors below. I could not see how he had managed to collect any light from this darkest of corners, but I quickly saw my error. For it was not light he bothered to collect in this way, but darkness.

Darkness was somehow channeled into the room and then filtered through those racks of purple bottles, in some of which I now thought to see floating specks and slowly tumbling shapes that might have been wine lees or bloodclots. I even speculated that I saw the fingers of a deformed, pickled foetus clutching at the rays that passed through its glass cell, playing inverse shadow-shapes on the walls of the dark room, casting its enlarged and gloomy spell over all us awed and frightened older children.

Unfiltered, the darkness was much harder to characterize; when I tried to peer into it, Aanschultz pulled me away, muttering, “Useless for our purposes.”

“Our?” I repeated, as if I had anything to do with this. For even then it seemed an evil power my friend had harnessed, something best left to its own devices–something which, in collaboration with human genius, could only lead to the worsening of an already precarious situation.

“This is my greatest work yet,” he confided, but I could see that his assistants thought otherwise. The shadows already darkening Europe seemed thickest in this corner of the room. I felt that the strangely beveled opening with its canted mirror inside a silvery-black throat, reflecting darkness from an impossible angle, was in fact the source of all unease to be found in the streets and in the marketplace. It was as if everyone had always known about this webby corner, and feared that it might eventually be prised open by the violent levering of a powerful mind.

I comforted myself with the notion that this was a discovery, not an invention, and therefore for all purposes inevitable. Given a mind as focused as Aanschultz’s, this corner was bound to be routed out and put to some use. However, I already suspected that the eventual use would not be that which Aanschultz expected.

I watched a thin girl with badly bruised arms weakly pulling a lever alongside the abat-nuit to admit more darkness through the purple bottles, and the deepening darkness seemed to penetrate her skin as well as the jars, pouring through the webs of her fingers, the meat of her arms, so that the shadows of bone and cartilege glowed within them, flesh flensed away in the revealing black radiance. It was little consolation to think that the discovery was implicit in the fact of this corner, this source of darkness built into the universe, embedded in creation like an aberration in a lens and therefore unavoidable. It had taken merely a mind possessed of an equal or complementary aberration to uncover it. I only hoped Aanschultz possessed the power to compensate for the darkness’s distortion, much as chromatic aberration may be compensated or avoided entirely by the use of an apochromatic lens. But I had little hope for this in my friend’s case. Have I mentioned it was his cruelty which chiefly attracted me?

Abaxial

Away from the axis. A term applied to the oblique or marginal rays passing through a lens. Thus the light of our story is inevitably deflected from its most straightforward path by the medium of the Encyclopaedia itself, and this entry in particular. Would that it were otherwise, and this a perfect world. Some go so far as to state that the entirety of Creation is itself an

Aberration

A functional result of optical law. Yet I felt that this matter might be considered Aanschultz’s fault, despite my unwillingness to think any ill of my friend. In my professional capacity, I was surrounded constantly by the fat and the beautiful; the lazy, plump and pretty. They flocked to my studio in hordes, in droves, in carriages and cars, in swan-necked paddle boats; and their laughter flowed up and down the three flights of stairs to my studios and galleries, where my polite assistants bade them sit and wait until Monsieur Artiste might be available. Sometimes Monsieur failed to appear at all, and they were forced with much complaining to be photographed by a mere apprentice, at a reduced rate, although I always kept on hand plenty of pre-signed plates so that they might take away an original and be as impressive as their friends. I flirted with the ladies; was indulgent with the children; I spoke to the gentlemen as if I had always been one of them, concerned with the state of trade, rates of exchange, the crisis in labor, the inevitable collapse of economies. I was in short a chameleon, softer than any of them, lazier and more variable, yet prouder. They meant nothing to me; they were all so easy and pretty and (I thought then) expendable.

Yet there was only one Aanschultz. On the first and only day he came to sit for me (he had decided to require all his staff to wear tintype badges for security reasons and himself set the first example), I knew I had never met his like. He looked hopelessly out of place in my waiting chambers, awkward on the steep stairs, white and etiolated in the diffuse cuprous light of my abat-jour. Yet his eyes were livid; he had violet pupils, and I wished–not for the first time–that there were some way of capturing color with all my clever lenses and cameras. None of my staff colorists could hope to duplicate that hue.

The fat pleasant women flocking the studios grew thin and uncomfortable at the sight of him, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, exuding sharp perfumes of fear that neutralized their ambergris and artificial scents. He did not leer or bare his teeth or rub his hands and cackle; these obvious melodramatic motions would only have cheapened and blunted the sense one had of his refined cruelty.

Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word. It was a severity in his nature–an unwillingness to tolerate any thought, sensation, or companion duller than a razor’s edge. I felt instantly stimulated by his presence, as if I had at last found someone against whom I could gauge myself, not as opponent or enemy, but as a student who forever tries and tests himself against the model of his mentor. In my youth I had known instinctively that it is always better to stay near those I considered my superiors; for then I could never let my own skills diminish, but must constantly be polishing and practicing them. With age and success, I had nearly forgotten that crucial lesson, having sheltered too long in the cozy nests and parlors of Society. Aanschultz’s laboratory proved to be their perfect antidote.

We two could not have been less alike. As I have said, I had no clear understanding of, and only slightly more interest in, the natural sciences. Art was All, to me. It had been my passion and my livelihood for so long now that I had nearly forgotten there was any other way of life. Aanschultz reintroduced me to the concepts of hard speculation and experimentation, a lively curriculum which soon showed welcome results in my own artistic practices. For in the city, certain competitors had mastered my methods and now offered similar services at lower prices, lacking only the fame of my name to beat me out of business. In the coltish marketplace, where economies trembled beneath the rasping tongue of forces so bleak they seemed the product of one’s own fears, with no objective source in the universe, it began to seem less than essential to possess an extraordinary signature on an otherwise ordinary photograph; why spend all that money for a Name when just down the street, for two-thirds the price, one could have a photograph of equivalent quality, lacking only my florid famous autograph (of which, after all, there was already a glut)? So you see, I was in danger already when I met Aanschultz, without yet suspecting its encroachment. With his aid I was soon able to improve the quality of my product far beyond the reach of my competitors. Once more my name reclaimed its rightful magic potency, not for empty reasons, not through mere force of advertising, but because I was indeed superior.

To all of Paris I might have been a great man, an artistic genius, but in Aanschultz’s presence I felt like a young and stupid child. The scraps I scavenged from his workshop floors were not even the shavings of his important work. He hardly knew the good he did me, for although an immediate bond developed between us, at times he hardly seemed aware of my presence. I would begin to think that he had forgotten me completely; weeks might pass when I heard not a word from him; and then, suddenly, my faith in our friendship would be reaffirmed, for out of all the people he might have told–his scientific peers, politicians, the wealthy–he would come to me first with news of his latest breakthrough, as if my opinion were of greatest importance to him. I fancied that he looked to me for artistic inspiration (no matter how much he might belittle the impulse) just as I came to him for his scientific rigor.

It was this rigor which at times bordered on cruelty–though only when emotion was somehow caught in the slow, ineluctably turning gears of his logic. He would not scruple to destroy a scrap of human fancy with diamond drills and acid blasts in order to discover some irreducible atom of hard fact (+10 on the Mohs’ scale) at its core. This meant, unfortunately, that each of his advances had left a trail of crushed “victims,” not all of whom had thrown themselves willingly before the juggernaut.

I sensed that this poor girl would soon be one of them.

Abrasion Marks

of a curious sort covered her arms, something like a cross between bruises, burns and blistering. Due to my own eczema, I felt a sympathic pang as she backed away from the levers of the abat-nuit, Aanschultz brushing her off angrily to make the final adjustments himself. She looked very young to be working such long hours in the darkness, so near the source of those strange black rays, but when I mentioned this to my friend he merely swept a hand in the direction of another part of the room, where a thin woman lay stretched out on a stained pallet, her arm thrown over her eyes, head back, mouth gaping; at first she appeared as dead as the drowned poseur Hippolyte Bayard, but I saw her breast rising and falling raggedly. The girl at the lever moved slowly, painfully, over to this woman and knelt down beside her, then very tenderly laid her head on the barely moving breast, so that I knew they were mother and child. Leaving Aanschultz for the moment, I sank down beside them, stroking the girl’s frayed black hair gently as I asked if there were anything I could do for them.

“Who’s there?” the woman said hoarsely.

I gave my name, but she appeared not to recognize it. She didn’t need illustrious visitors now, I knew.

“He’s with the Professor,” the child said, scratching vigorously at her arms though it obviously worsened them. I could see red, oozing meat through the scratches her fingernails left.

“You should bandage those arms,” I said. “I have sterile cloth and ointment in my carriage if you’d like me to do it.”

“Bandages and ointment, he says,” said the woman. “As if there’s any healing it. Leave her alone now–she’s done what she could where I had to leave off. You’ll just get the doctor mad at both of us.”

“I’m sure he’d understand if I—”

“Leave us be!” the woman howled, sitting up now, propped on both hands so that her eyes came uncovered, to my horror; for across her cheeks, forehead and nose was an advanced variety of the same damage her daughter suffered; her eyesockets held little heaps of charred ash that, as she thrust her face forward in anger, poured like black salt from between her withered lids and sifted softly onto the floor, reminding me unavoidably of that other and most excellent abrading powder which may be rubbed on dried negatives to provide a “tooth” for the penciller’s art, consisting of one part powdered resin and two parts cuttle-fish bone, the whole being sifted through silk. I suspected this powder would do just as well, were I crass enough to gather it in my kerchief. She fell back choking and coughing on the black dust, beating at the air, while her daughter moved away from me in tears, and jumped when she heard Aanschultz’s sharp command. I turned to see my friend beckoning with one crooked finger for the girl to come and hold the levers just so while he screwed down a clamp.

“My God, Aanschultz,” I said, without much hope of a satisfactory answer. “Don’t you see what your darkness has done to these wretches?”

He muttered from the side of his mouth: “It’s not a problem any longer. A short soak in a bath of potassium iodide and iodine will protect the surface from abrasion.”

“A print surface, perhaps, but these are people!”

“It works on me,” he said, thrusting at me a bare arm that showed scarcely any scarring. “Now either let the girl do her work, or do it for her.”

I backed away quickly, wishing things were otherwise; but in those days Aanschultz and his peers needed fear no distracting investigations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He could with impunity remain oblivious to everything but the work that absorbed him.

Absorption

This term is used in a chemical, an optical, and an esoteric sense. In the first case designates the taking up of one substance by another, just as a sponge absorbs or sucks up water, with hardly any chemical but merely a physical change involved; this is by far the least esoteric meaning, roughly akin to those surface phenomena which Aanschultz hoped to strip aside.

Optically, absorption is applied to the suppression of light, and to it are due all color effects, including the dense dark stippling of the pores of Aanschultz’s face, ravaged by the pox in early years, and the weird violet aura–the same color as his eyes, as if it had bled out of them–that limned his profile as he bent closer to that weirdly angled aperture into artificial darkness.

My friend, with unexpected consideration for my lack of expertise, now said: “According to Draper’s law, only those rays which are absorbed by a substance act chemically on it; when not absorbed, light is converted into some other form of energy. This dark beam converts matter in ways heretofore unsuspected, and is itself transformed into a new substance. Give me my phantospectroscope.”

This last command was meant for the girl, who hurriedly retrieved a well-worn astrolabe-like device from a concealed cabinet and pressed it into her master’s hands.

“The spectrum is like nothing ever seen on this earth,” he said, pulling aside the rack of filter bottles and bending toward his abat-nuit with the phantospectroscope at his eye, like a sorcerer stooping to divine the future in the embers of a hearth where some sacrifice has just done charring. I could not bear the cold heat of that unshielded black fire. I took several quick steps back.

“I would show you,” he went on, “but it would mean nothing to you. This is my real triumph, this phantospectroscope; it will be the foundation of a new science. Until now, visual methods of spectral inspection have been confined to the visible portion of the spectrum; the ultraviolet and infrared regions gave way before slow photographic methods; and there we came to a halt. But I have gone beyond that now. Ha! Yes!”

He thrust the phantospectroscope back into the burned hands of his assistant and made a final adjustment to the levers that controlled the angle and intensity of rays conducted through the abat-nuit. As the darkness deepened in that clinical space, it dawned on me that the third and deepest meaning of absorption was something like worship, and not completely dissimilar to terror.

Accelerator!

my friend shouted, and I sensed rather than saw the girl moving toward him, but too slowly. Common accelerators are sodium carbonate, washing soda, ammonia, potassium carbonate, sodium hydrate (caustic soda), and potassium hydrate (caustic potash), none of which suited Aanschultz. He screamed again, and now there was a rush of bodies, a crush of them in the small corner of the room. An accelerator shortens the duration of development and brings out an image more quickly, but the images he sought to capture required special attention. As is written in the Encylopaedia of Photography (1911, exoteric edition), “Accelerators cannot be used as fancy dictates.” I threw myself back, fearful that otherwise I would be shoved through the gaping abat-nuit and myself dissolve into that negative essence. I heard the girl mewing at my feet, trod on by her fellows, and I leaned to help her up. But at that moment there was a quickening in the evil corner, and I put my hands to a more instinctive use.

Accommodation Of The Eye

The darkness cupped inside my palms seemed welcoming by comparison to the anti-light that had emptied the room of all meaning. With both eyes covered, I felt I was beyond harm. I could not immediately understand the source of the noises and commotion I heard around me, nor did I wish to. (See also, “Axial Accommodation.”)

Accumulator

Apparently (and this I worked out afterward in hospital beside Aanschultz) the room had absorbed its fill of the neutralizing light. All things threatened to split at their seams. Matter itself, the atmosphere, Aanschultz’s assistants, bare thought, creaking metaphor–these things and others were stuffed to the bursting point. My own mind was a peaking crest of images and insights, a wave about to break. Aanschultz screamed incomprehensible commands as he realized the sudden danger; but there must have been no one who still retained the necessary self-control to obey him. My friend himself leapt to reverse the charge, to shut down the opening, sliding the rack of filtering jars back in place–but even he was too late to prevent one small, significant rupture.

I heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. Aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can I–nor would I– discredit him.

It was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. Or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. Other receptacles opened with more deliberation. Aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. The dripping and splashes and soft wet steps I heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. My own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for I felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. I forced myself to tear my hands away from my face–while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut–and leaned down to offer help. No sooner had I taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. Fearing that I was aggravating her wounds, I relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. It was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if I were her final anchor. As soon as I realized this, as soon as I tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. I heard her mother calling. The girl’s cries were smothered. Across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely. My first impulse was to follow, but I could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open.

“A light!” I shouted, and Aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: “No!”

But too late. The need for fire was instinctive, beyond Aanschultz’s ability to quell by force or reason. A match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, Aanschultz’s most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax…although the denouement for the rest of Europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one.

Acetaldehyde

(See“Aldehyde.”)

Acetic Acid

The oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. It is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place.

Acetic Ether

Synonym, ethyl acetate. A light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. It should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable.

Acetone

A colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. As the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper.

Acetous Acid

The old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (which see). Highly inflammable.

Acetylene

A hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. It is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. It burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. Acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent. of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination.

Acetylene Generator

An apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. Copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed.

Acetylide Emulsion

Wratten and Mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. While this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in Professor Conreid Aanschultz’s laboratory were of no lasting significance. This misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. We are only now beginning to see what Aanschultz glimpsed in an instant.

“What man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress, is impossible to predict.”

— Michael Faraday

End

September 25, 2013
Attempts on Life

Annemarie Kemeny

Department of English
SUNY-Stony Brook

Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, I’m just the mouth piece. The whole is buried in an old plot with its corpse roaming. Sometimes it comes to haunt me, and I spill a little wine on the carpet to loosen its tongue. There are no guests. They’d expect butter-churn stories complete with cow bells in some smoky evening, the fat dripping from a one-day-dead pig. A real red dawn summoned by the five-year plan to every village. And will you visit Ellis Island where all you people come from? This frantic itch to swear shivers in through walls and sticks. Words at times are juicy as the glutton’s steak. A real mouth piece. For what? Speech is in my fingertips. It has been known to bloom through ten skyfuls of snow. It also melts in Spring. And it always finds the surest dam.

No, it’s not poor huddled masses of Cassandras convulsing to the currents of a blank Apollo. Our frames are not that open to the trade winds. I’ve seen Parnassus gray and bare against the sun. It’s a good spook dressed in crags. But something else. When it takes hold, I never twitch and this broken English ain’t no second tongue. It’s one big jam to scramble the airwaves to my crib. Before my mouth was a piece of something. Like a slice of pie missing the perfection of its disk. Except that Sylvie had a hunch about that. Perfection is terrible–it cannot have children. So I dish it piecemeal for a new set of yakkers who will ask the past in and play at haunted house. Well, I lied. I twitch something crazy when it takes hold. We both grab tight until I fade. It’s a seance. Anything short of a seance is a good short story neatly tied like tubes. Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, it’s a badmouth, and it’s blowing at a land that hasn’t slipped.

***

Writing is the only act worth dropping. It wouldn’t suffer from ending on the rocks like meat does. Its split-open muscles wouldn’t twitch. Its broken shinbone wouldn’t slice through skin. It would just silently carve itself into a whole coast line of Rosetta stones. But what would it be carving if not the meat that fell with it? The world text has real god-chunks rotting between vowels. Somewhere amidst the schizes and flows of ecriture a tiny slit is bleeding where some uncle’s finger scraped it. Don’t you feel your narratives of oppression and your literary productions of the real stuffed to bursting with the thief’s missing ear, some woman’s bloodless clitoris and her daughter’s head, your apple, that fell too far from its tree? This ink, invisible though it is, has come from where her head and body used to meet.

***

The wall by my bed was always threatening to fall–it sustained cannon-ball damage during the war. I constantly wanted to excavate, hoping to find the ammunition all pock-marked and heavy. Momma, of course, assured me that the only thing left of it was a shaky wall we couldn’t hang pictures on. Yet regardless of her hovering protectively between me and the world as any good Rilkean mother would, I spent my childhood with a phantom cannon ball lodged ominously behind a thin layer of plaster and an even thinner layer of yellow paint. I used to tap the wall as a primitive form of eartraining, and soon I could tell that it had more holes than it had bricks. This wall I faced every night in sleep, this wall that felt cool against my feet in summer, was my umbilical chord to 1944. Sure I had seen films like Budapest Spring in which women, who always looked a bit too much like grandmother with their soft brown waves falling to the side and the dark lipstick and the severe wool suit, were shot into the Danube. I remember the domino effect, the unflattering shoes left behind for the Arrow Cross gunners who were flipping for gold insoles, and then the utter vacuum of a spring sky admitting nothing. And I remember this woman and a man doing the love thing when all the Danube carried was pieces of the Black Forest. And if there ever was such a thing as ancestral memory, I remember hiding between the waxed cracks of the parquet when grandmother stuffed her down pillow under her dress. She wanted to look pregnant for the Arrow Cross.

Momma gets this sudden space in her eyes as she tries to describe for me the sound of machine guns on a tenement lock. I want to tell her I was there hiding out under her shoes, too shocked to scream, with all our eyelids doing a crazy family dance to a-thousand-rounds-per-minute and grandmother’s pillow bulging out to her right side where no infant could live. And the door slamming the wall of the foyer and grandmother squeezing momma so close that the down in the pillow cracks and the orders for the swine to move and the gun to the spine and momma’s whimpering into grandmother’s belly and grandmother’s dark lips in a line with the horizon and the words ghetto and lager and grandfather’s rages melting through his knees–we are poor got nothing but a wife and kid and trouble on the way spare us you are good men–rifle butt between the ribs and the trembling sullen bargain-begging silent sobbing unbroken procession of yellow stars down the stone corridor and the fresh blood seeping into my floorcrack from the grooves of a stolen shoe.

I would like to say I remember the ghetto–that I was the guts, the little bit of future in every willed breath grandmother took to survive. I can’t. Maybe ancestral memory has more holes in it than bricks. It would be the stench I would have to bring to the page–one of those fold-out ads that trap clouds of perfume and give a magazine its sex appeal. Step right up folks, sample the dying and the decomposed. Just do it with the lushly dead. Poke your nose into communal buckets for the urge. Try to dig up asphalt with soupy nails to bury the dead. No. You can’t keep from being haunted. No Achilles here to come down a peg. Not even Dali to paint your shit surreal. And it’s the stench that blinds you and plugs your ears and numbs your touch that I can’t conjure up. It’s unnameable. The only true god the ghetto ever knew.

***

The war never happened. Grandmother is goo-goo-eyed over the soaps. My other grandmother is dead after a life-time of rheumatism and which seventeenth-century king fucked whom with what underhanded purposes. The war never happened. And what bastard or bitch was next on the throne. Daddy cultivated a fine cancer by minimizing his diet to headcheese and spam. I don’t remember his teeth so the fact that he lost them at eighteen is irrelevant. The war never happened. And how many boils Marx had. And how she was ashamed of her big breasts and how she wrapped them until they sagged. The man-bird has to dress nice if he wants to be a father. That’s why only the woman-bird is gray. That yellow and blue thing on the teapot must have been a man-bird then. The war never happened. We won’t cry over spilt blood. If we drown the baby in the bathwater, it will finally make sense to dump her. And what a big nose you have. You’ve seen one snowflake, you’ve seen them all. The war never happened. And your mother is a beautiful woman. She can afford unlimited hours of beauty sleep now that the government check has replaced my only son (cries profusely). And you know Rasputin was a rascal. You don’t know who Rasputin was? (sigh). The family is going to the dogs. The war never happened. I prayed and prayed on that cold stone floor for him to return. And he cut off their heads because they wouldn’t give him sons. And the cat you dragged in gave me fleas for a week. How is your beautiful mother? The war never happened.

***

Writing is the only act worth acting out. If you prefer the organic metaphor, it takes root against the wind in deserts and its ghost dance splashes the sun. It oozes down in glaciers and builds islands. It drags on. It prefers the whip. It picks its scabs against the ultimate, the strong. Does nothing. Mimes. Gets hooked on opium and dreams. Carries its fetus to the nearest john. Drops hints. Puts in a few good words. Bleeds and takes a scraping against cancer. Dies.

***

Purges in triumphant silence. Daddy would appear once a light year at our place as the man of science come to chide the masses for belief in words that kill and the evil eye. He took the empty streetcar across the Danube, full of compassion for lost time. I’d summon fevers, hacking coughs, wounds attributed to something someone said. An aura of fake death to kindle old paternal fears about succession. And you thought our transcendental Fathers bit the clay. No. They dance to our rhythms now and obey false cadences as if their life depended on it. It does.

Let me break the silence. If you plan to butcher someone’s soul–either little by little over that proverbial lifetime-of- devotion, or suddenly, by wringing their thin chicken neck– someone is writing your darkroom dirties into headlines. When you get the urge to abandon what you made, your airplane will excrete it. When you tear your side to dig through ribs, the pain of wrenching will be more than biblical. Somebody will sign their name across your lungs. Every time you breathe it will muck up the room. And when your gossip blooms red in the spring, stones will mark the spot where the town whore bled. Every foot that wanders bare into your town will read it. Their prints will talk up a storm. And when you gather your token nigger in your arms and rent your wisdom out on what it takes to loosen the embrace, your balls will vanish whip, chain and uncle, from the book.

So daddies of the world with your magic carpets and skeleton closets, relax. I’ve come bearing gifts. You’ve asked me in song, you’ve sworn me in rape. Here is your immortality.

***

According to Rilke, poetry is a kind of apprenticeship that prepares the most deserving among us for love. It is a beautiful sentiment (letter seven, the one about relationships), but I am slightly suspicious about electing a chosen people based upon oneself. The big bang might be lonelier than the poetic stairs you had to take to reach it. We might say that disgust and disillusionment were the lot of those writhing, huddled masses that were not developing into healthy apple trees. But what if I, the living mascot of the developmental tale, should find some more disgust and disillusionment at the height of my seedy powers? What if I, poet extraordinaire, wheeler-dealer in immortality, should get stuck around the crotch of my inevitable Bildungsroman given me by covenant? Oh yes! The rainbow sign. God gave Lawrence the rainbow sign. The world made new. “From the heart a red ray, from the brow a gold, from the hips a violet leaps.” Violet, indeed. Royal purple. The seed of seeds. The hottest chemical stain on the market. Except that my mother and my grandmother always insist on invisible ink. Like the one I am writing with now.

***

Didn’t drown. Didn’t break his neck-joint in a scarf-loop. Didn’t pine away on poison petals for unrequited love. Didn’t overdose on elixir. Didn’t dry out with the weeds on a war field, sword-in-hand. Consumption didn’t eat holes into him. His wasn’t a one-woman oven in a kitchen pumped to the stature of Auschwitz. But his head was brought in upon platter if war is half the bitch of legends. And his head held a tongue that spoke the smallest scrap of Babel. A chip off the old block that was once some God’s shoulder curve. Whose face was it this time that launched a thousand cattle trains to camp? He wrote poems about chickenwire stretching in the moonlight, juiced. And before that it was moonlight and the weight of lovers bending emblems into wheat fields. No one knows him in this world of nations. Any verdict he might have improvised from bone-mush is Chinese or Greek, at best. Bla-bla from the belly of a war that never happened. So let me give you lives in a nutshell, without cracking the meat.

Don’t know date of birth. Don’t know age at death. Killed his twin brother as he slid through the birth canal. An inadvertent crushing, a tarrying for green light. Killed his mother on entering. The world. The guilt of the sole survivor until they herded him into the engine. Premonitions of the past. To think in metaphor despite the fleas, the typhoid and the guards. Hallucinations of the sane. Eclogues and hexameter finally worthy of their turf. An artificial genre, like summer homes and quick vacations, like showers in gas. All the civilized comforts a bit displaced in one postmodern jumble. Hocus pocus. If we kick our plot in the usual place, we’ll lay to rest our master narrative. The nazis were great masters of the readymade. The cutting edge in surreal flicks. The expert tease. The laugh behind the flow and schiz. A woman’s buttock– a bar of soap. Her hair–a blanket against Russian winters. Let’s disconnect the oven and frustrate their expectations of the clean. When they try to read the nozzle in the old way as a comfy mother’s womb, we’ll surprise them with the atmosphere. A one-act play for lungs. Then we’ll reconnect the oven and fry our hungry guests.

Want to document how signifiers play? Go read a deathcamp. Do your number on the Palestinian shifter. See if the bullet has a referent. And when I give you this life in a nutshell, be glad the meat is gone.

***

Somewhere in its bedded mud the Danube holds a skeleton crouched into a barrel. The familiar closet would’ve hit too close to the so-called nerve. Saint Gellert rolled from the top of the mountain, Saint Gellert on the rocks. The hill channels the river’s curve where the roaring barrel did its belly-flop. I swore I had given up this conjuring of lives from the nutshell. A necromancing crook that pulls more than veils over your eyes. A tale told. For the welfare of the worm in the apple. Do you like picking history in the warm autumn breezes to make cider? Maybe with a small edge to the flow, a little cloud to hide the nakedness. Wait! We are born opaque and make loads of noise. Good. Roll out the barrel and we’ll have a barrel of fun.

Isn’t it strange that the wine was so literally red on landing. Or rivering. If it was in winter, there might have been a loud crack and splat–a momentary wave-crest over drift- ice, maybe a quick whirlpool that popped up, and then the heavy ooze of the iced river blanketing the deed. If it was in spring, the drop would’ve been shortened by the volume of molten snow eating up the banks. If the sun shone, the contour of the barrel over those jutting white rocks may have left the eyes of the onlookers sore with knowing. If it was misty with a thick drizzle (the bitten kind), those connoisseurs of wine may have felt a muffled twang at the sudden lack of sound. And maybe the barrel was rotten or too dry and was smashed half-way down the trip and left just the typical roll of a breaking body down the slope. Or maybe, like the war, it never happened. The executioners didn’t stop and dip their hands in the Danube’s upper stretch.

***

They have those silver poplars pillaring our field of vision. The summer light is wind-blown over reclining hills and it teases out those woman dreams that everyone forgets after the cock’s crow. The usual distance shimmers with breath. Where the poet stood, the dirt road whispers that the land is a unanimous womb and all those rows a welcome mat to wipe on. You see, the polka-dotted maiden with the pitcher spilling on her breast just got done tying the red scarf around the neck of her baby pioneer. Maybe for you she shook ribbons into her cleavage, shoe-stringed to woo your pen from the lazy fruit trees and the sailing grass. What she picks out of the earth is too small–a patch of grease for the work week’s engine. And the stain of currants popping on the tongue and the orchards where we picked them shoot the breeze. She stirs the grub and embroiders the foreman’s day with thighs. The mother, whom our poet laureate imagined hen-shaped, cooking with smoke that tints the village, has just stopped bowing at the medal conferred upon her Hindu arms. She brings the slab of bacon from the snaking food line and melts it into the land’s familial romance. All around her the blond river Tisza shivers in its banks toward Africa. It will never reach.

There have been marches en masse–the wind-tickled imaginary sighs. Those dances that convulse the hips stop and start, turning black or turning blue against the wall. When I open the latest version of the nation’s history, my pressed daughter will crumble out, missing at the edges. The paragraph is stained. And where she never was, the next world will grow up and spit itself in the eye. As she tears half her usual freedom into tatters, she thinks it’s real. Somewhere in a nerve her pricked fingers still sting from pinning a new flag on the sky. She thinks it’s real. As good as the next fluffy cloud or geometric plane or poem or meal or bed. This woman mooned the red star as it fell. But before that, she grew wet just thinking of its tips. Five was her lucky number. So, as General Electric spreads her chignoned, waltzing on the screen, maybe something of her shrinks from the lens. If Lenin never lived, still doesn’t live, and never will live, maybe something of herself will miss the feel of her legs as she is gliding. She’ll grow wet to the rhythms of Strauss and think it real. After all, she is the map they have redrawn again. If they pressed hard enough this time, maybe the Danube spilled under her skin to let her know. It never had been, still isn’t, and never will be, blue.

***

I took to sailors early. It was the gifts they lavished on my buxom, melancholy mother. We’d share the foreign spoils, which were the promises of tangible mornings in the kitchen, burned eggs, the concrete linking of hands despite high levels of lead in the blood. Everything was Made in DDR, England, the USA. And the marriages that never took place must have been made in that eroticized heaven where Christ could satisfy a universe of the rejected.

It always seemed to happen in summer. As soon as I could talk, we boarded trains for Yugoslavia, Austria. My mother read expectation into every reeling cornfield and foresaw the light at the end of tunnels miles before they dawned. I still feel like a dingy rabbit’s foot–the guarantor of consonants and vowels against their tarnishing at sea. At our destinations we were always the last to leave the platform. Our bundles, too, were amulets–all this snail house baggage couldn’t possibly be stranded in some corridor of space, without a house somewhere to fill.

I felt smaller than the clutter we compressed into the journey. The transition from sentences to asphalt was never smooth or matter-of-fact. I needed to sleep away all that nowhere, the opal shimmering left of my mother as she hovered between the last man and thin air. Someone should’ve told her that Marlow was chiseled for calling her the horror of the world. Why was Brandy such a fine girl? Was it because she put out and launched slow, mournful ballads out to sea? She should’ve been a fire-breathing typhoon to wreak havoc on that freighter’s bonding crew as they were swapping conquered-pussy stories in the dark.

It was strange to see my mother fade in and out of flesh like some Star Trek goddess beamed aboard the Enterprise but lost in transit. We just sat there, crouched on the bundles made of coats, dishes, nail files, underwear, shoes, and let the dusk fall down on us. I don’t know what she was hoping for in the hundredth abandoned railroad station with a shitload of history on her back. Could it be that history doesn’t repeat? That each time she made the epic journey from bed to some forever she traveled light on the aura of first love? Did she see the ship ceremonically sunk in favor of the land where words take root and grow old together as stories?

The train already left our side to transport tourists to their beige hotels. I listened in disbelief to the announcer’s voice prattling train schedules, insisting on the punctual arrival of the 5:05 from Athens. But I know that every time I have a memory of waiting, or scribble the outlines of madonna and child on paper, I become an announcer of schedules, the I.O.U. for the timely arrival of bodies. I really don’t remember two drained figures holding vigil over vacuum. All train stations look the same to me with their Simon and Garfunkel burn-out, and what really stands out about momma’s boyfriends is their vanishing.

We took the 10:16 back. The train was gray and the seats were a red, gray, beige, black vinyl weave. We saw nothing of tunnels or cornfields. Our reflections rode with us in a steady drama of double or nothing. Momma’s evenly sloping nose stood guard against the penetrating stranger straight across, already offering me half his sandwich. He struck up a conversation with me about the mystery blond by my side, and despite the constant shattering of facts against the wheels, I nudged my mother accomplice-fashion and she beamed him a smile. What I remember most about him is his disappearance over breakfast a month later, and the brass tacks of the journey I wouldn’t bet a life on.

***

Writing, lately, has been an act of desperation. I am not proud of that. Grabbing for a phrase as if it were a life- preserver leaves all kinds of revolutionary fervor to be desired. You can’t build utopia entirely on blind jabs at the future. I ought to plan for a watershed; for that erogenous point I can put my ring finger on; the epitome. But in the meantime, how do I keep from drowning in my own shed water? Maybe I’m just trying to understand what chronology obscures. Looking for the old one- two punch–writing blow by blow. Maybe I thrive on acts of desperation-the pointed gun; the gossip about how it wilts; the numbness of steel in the soul always mistaken for strength; the cut-throat word that finishes the present and makes future out of death. Very pagan. Very Judeo-Christian. It smacks of Nirvana. Strawberry Fields. Maybe it’s the blind jab that distills specks of place for us to live in. We are here to say, Rilke says. We are here to keep quiet, lest we disturb the dark gods, Lawrence says. Let the cunt and prick speak in silences. But what Lawrence never owned up to was that his words were full of pricks and cunts, just as those pricks and cunts were full of words. And maybe every desperate act is an attempt to save the dignity of that union from ourselves.

***

Don’t matter which boot-licking shore. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs that get to light the stove. The braindead books are leaning into our middles like international candy and we lick into the air. Grandma’s stroke coincided with call waiting. The four-foot pillar next door had no dough for health insurance. Made a sissy of her boy who masturbates and cries on trains. She has to tell me over the line where a numb electric goddess towels off her pain. She is next wall to me. I’m sick of hearing her distance through the bricks. I’m sick of hearing that boy’s silence through my fucking.

Meanwhile, Diamond goes life hopping between two shores. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs who’d love to burn him but instead will light the stove. It only hit me now that cigarettes are nested coals of fire. They feel like a mind one is about to lose. If only it could stay on the bus like a black umbrella. A bone I could bury like a dog. I’d die of rabies. Watch it float away on a trash mission in space. I swear I’d let it bleed from my busted reputation like some red desert. But it sticks and smells and thinks into the sink as ochre moments of the day when the heat becomes a man. The wheat waves through my windows. It is lotus and at night I light the stove. Grandma’s stroke will have to wait. The neighbor’s baby has to swim another month. I can’t afford this calling, dust to flight.

***

Dottie was the scrawny one who turned to tube pants at twelve. Cricket was freckled with Machiavellian talents for stealing the boys. She developed first. But only like goats with first Moses horns that itch. We followed with loose cotton hills moving to some law of plate tectonics, subject to erosion by wind and sand. Judy was the one becoming V. Her doctor told her about how an eighteen-year-old body grew up in her thirteen- year-old shell. Convenient as hell. Agatha sang. Her mother used to cut warts from shifty hands and counsel men on rashes that broke out in dreams. I hated the smell of offices like hers. And the skin problems of men. Scylla also developed first. I thought I’d be Charybdis and find out which death the boys preferred. They liked their water on the rocks, but didn’t know myths that bodies move by. Scylla had no need for sisters to complete a testy, rotten passage, they said.

That year we tried on one another’s souls like languages that never meant a thing. Why lie? It was like bee-hive clinging scatterbrained after the rocks the first boys threw. We never shared blood like brothers. The only stains we knew were test runs of saliva over our blue jeans to prove they were authentic, from America. None of them was. We had to fake our clothes, our breasts, immutable spaces the eye can always skip, our allegiance to the revolution, our fashionable longing for the West, our pains.

Even then the bee-bee-gunning menace was cutting off his sister’s head in photos. We thought him a danger only to the birds. And that boy who threw the hypodermic in my back from twenty feet must have stabbed by now. He was a connoisseur of wounds, an art critic on purples, blues and black paling toward yellow.

Yes, at Judy’s party it was Judy’s turn to cry. Nobody stabbed her, exactly. Maybe just a little in the back. Her doctor with the needles (a balder version of the spearing brat). Her doctor with the pills. Her parents with their booze license for daughters who talked back. Her hairdresser who told her blonds have fun. Her manicurist who discounted on blood. Her teachers who stripped her of all this. Her friends who conformed to hating bitches. Her mispronunciation of her dread, the silencing of always-spoken letters. Her body language from the wrist. The nowhere long before they found her dead.

They said shoo, and we flew away to strange inside countries where the prices are too high and we are always spotted for tourists hunting down mementos for a rush; where we think the women too pregnant, the men too chauvinistic for our taste, the air too brutal, the bridges unsafe, the ruins too old, the words too dense to get through. And where we are the women raising men, breathing bare necessary gulps, crossing our bras, renovating murals to cover up the crumbling of our tissue, settling for the first ventriloquist.

And then there were none. The pedophile’s childless wife suddenly broke in half. They buried her with a bunch of limestone angels, her heart completely bored. She believed in Christmas and the grace of God and the husband she took instead. Then the seamstress lost the rhythm of her pedal, the string snapped, the tapestry flew out and up. No child–no Lady of Shallott. No Sleeping Beauty. No Arachne. And no calico to warm somebody’s bed. Just a click of the line and the mannequin crushed into a landfill. Someday she’ll appear cross-sectioned for geologists as a scrawny layer of their momma scraping hell. The third one grew a cancer in her lung and let it spread. It ate up everything she ate, threw the ceiling in relief, bulged in through the door despite the dresser. It turned her smile into papyrus, and every line that rationed her got brutally recorded. But I have kept no records. I tried but they don’t keep. Hers served well as shroud at the cremation. The next-in-line’s still beating up some stone. A spinster who fucked boys for pleasure, then made them laugh into an ecstasy of piss. The irreverent bitch had the audacity to pass go more than once without the huffing and puffing that peacocks live as law. She was uglier than Fate and told more truth. And if she hadn’t smoked her throat shut like a grave, she’d still be stripping an emperor of clothes.

The phone was disconnected last night. The mailman broke a leg. I do not socialize. I avoid God like the plague. I scared the paperboy away by raving. The sky stares in the window to meet blinds. I’m popping caffeine pills as garlic against telepathic dreams. But I feel mirrors in my bones like some damned Dorian Gray. And the bitches of the world are dying without quaint proper goodbyes, or burials at sea, or conduct books in strength for those of us still breaking.

***

Kemeny. Let’s trace Kemeny. Probably Cohen. Or Klein. When the first wave invaded with the jingle-jangle of their coins. Hard. So hard. In English. When they invaded with that Eastern-European darkness they learned from the air. Momma’s joujou, a fashion jewel in the crown of creation from that red clay, that Adam. Ornaments in earth tone. Toned down. Turned out. And staring at those iron mines she pricked her hand to taste them. And then she slid. Out from under the heavy sky. The fun was in sliding with the pebble dance where nothing cared about landing. Queen Anne’s lace caught in the weeds. A saint, too, with clean hands. Maria, the dove love woman, plump in the middle of a valley looking up. But the sky is so much heavier down here. Hard luck with a calling in October. Stuck. Stuck to her rump like syrup. You catch flies with sugar, honey. Then you’re eaten into the bargain. I’ve seen them pass on with those huge “WET PAINT” signs hung all over. And some made vicious bull’s eyes. It stuck, as always. With only themselves for hope chest. They hold a lot so they figured gold.

Up in the hills it seemed like rashes. Some Rebecca, some Rachel of the salve. Lines get so tangled in a cat’s claws. But the road was a line and it drove. Until it ended in a sea somewhere where ships sink or sail. Back there, hunched over the meat, someone must have tamed a dragon. Even the sea has a hot red belly when it turns. And imagining the sea she pricked her hand to taste it. Iron again. They make rails and bars and hammers. Brave magnetic world. When does it call for blue lightning? A big KEMENY crouching in the weeds. She must be glaring under all that midday sun. In the mines they would blast her to bits. That’s what the signs are about. To warn in case she treasures something more than a good glance. She pricked her hand so she could close her eyes. It was damn loud in the Queen Anne’s lace with the dove love woman dreaming.

September 25, 2013

Dressed to Kill Yourself

Rob Hardin

DUPLICATE FOG AND DRESDEN CERUMEN
================================================================
There had been a series of     |   (Tuesday, July 9th, 1985: was
spectacular killings west of   |   it something I'd said, or had
New Haven.  By all reports,    |   the individual molecules of
the victims had been           |   styrene in Molly's flaming
imaginatively disfigured.  The |   plastic cup become volatile
textured palette techniques by |   mutagens, altering her genes? 
which their intestines had     |   Why had her lips become seven-
been rearranged to suggest     |   foot-long cave worms that
Satan Casting ET Into The Lake |   writhed whenever the DFA
of Fire were the subject of    |   inspector passed?  I tried not
both critical praise and       |   to feel personally insulted,
craftsman's speculation.  How  |   but the vertigo and loss of
had the strangely anonymous    |   memory caused by low-level
murderer been able to make his |   exposure to polycyclic
parings in the murk acquire    |   aromatics was getting to me. 
such distinct borders?  Of     |   Hell, I thought, why not
particular interest was his    |   propose on my monomer-dusted
work in broken capillaries.    |   knees (the surfaces of which
Here, the shadings of blue and |   were already beginning to
red were so subtle as to       |   pulsate with passion and
suggest the airbrush work of   |   deformity)?  But it was too
Futura 2000 (an ancient LES    |   late.  Molly had already
artist whose techniques have   |   changed into a 350-nanograms-
been much imitated in these    |   per-gram representation of the
times of draftsmen automatons. |   Rape of the Sabine Women,
                               |   rendered in hot pink fur.)
But after the telejournalist   |
reviews and panel discussions  |   Privately, however, Onion knew
had thoroughly analyzed Khaki  |   the true reason for his
Cadaver 5, and academidroids   |   success: his ability to utter
were left to dry-hump its      |   wordless streams of syllables
aesthetic until the skin had   |   that reduced his clients to a
been worn away, the public's   |   soporific state in which
lack of interest voided the    |   they'd empty their wallets,
subject.  There was something  |   drop their pants, and imagine
precious in the murderer's     |   themselves contestants on
technique; it was too self-    |   Wheel of Fortune.  For Onion's
conscious; it lacked that      |   special episode, the usual
bold, splashy manner which     |   wheel was replaced by a huge,
Americans love.  His would     |   proctologically correct
never be the work of a         |   representation of Vanna
successful mainstream killer-- |   White's anus just after sodomy
but since the murderer was an  |   by the entire executive staff
idiot savant, perhaps          |   of CBS.  The inflamed areas
financial success were better  |   were marked off in greed-
left to those who would        |   inducing shades of olive and
actually recognize its         |   magenta, and bore the
rewards.                       |   potential scores which a spin
                               |   of the anus might achieve: sex
Dwayne was a hydrocephalic     |   with broccoli pulverizers,
millionaire who had squandered |   cappucino sprinklers,
his trust fund on musical dog  |   vibrating swimsuit erasers,
collars.  They'd arrived by    |   you name it.  The grand prize
the mobile homeful,            |   was this: the endangered
ritualistically daisy-chained  |   wildlife species of the
to Victrolas.  But when his    |   contestant's choice, smeared
brokers came to remove his     |   with Heinz 57 and slivers of
sternum and optic fiber caps,  |   prosciutto, and offered to him
Dwayne knew it was time to     |   for ocular penetration.
join RMSA (Retarded            |
Millionaire Sexaholics         |
Anonymous) or face a life of   |
aggressive, monosyllabic       |
panhandling.  At RMSA, he met  |
a friend who was to become the |
very apex of his sobriety:     |
Onion, a mongoloid turpentine  |
heir who'd spent his entire    |
fortune on topless shoe-       |
shines.  Through the I-Can't-  |
Count-But-There-Are-More-      |
Steps-Than-I-Have-Fingers      |
Program, he became a           |
successful infanticide         |
entrepreneur, setting up his   |
own BabyHeadGallery--a name    |
which reflected both the       |
nature of the murders and the  |
stunted emotional growth of    |
the killers themselves.        |
=================================================================

DRESSED TO KILL YOURSELF:
=================================================================
                                |
The sites he recalled were      |  It was a voice that seemed too
side-roads of the broken.   The |  aware of time.  Pitches came
faces of dispirited mobs, a     |  unmoored, syllables lengthened
driftwood of deltas--even the   |  to slow tides.  Explanations
people he'd killed formed a     |  deserted the speaker, leaving
discontinuous whole.  It was a  |  dribbled ellipses, or
pattern he'd noticed before,    |  consonants like sliced
though not until now with       |  fingertips.  It had only one
resignation.                    |  thing to express--the
                                |  hesitation had become the
Earlier that afternoon, the     |  outline of the inexpressible. 
rest stops of the dead had      |  An aural watermark of
seemed merely pathetic.  Poor   |  Katherine's wordless fear.
puny things, he'd said,         |
quoting Dwight Frye as he set   |  Now it is midnight.  His
fire to a corpse's hair.  He'd  |  uneasiness recedes, allowing
watched it burn with something  |  him to feel the night air.  It
like aesthetic pleasure--the    |  sweeps across his face from
temples torch-maned, the eyes   |  the open window.  He remembers
past all statement, like        |  paying to sit here--someone
erasures.  Then he'd doused     |  else's memory, a news clip he
the smoldering skull with       |  was too preoccupied to watch. 
Cabarnet and gently placed it   |  He sits beside a fat teenager
with the others.  It was the    |  with confederate flag patches
zero-wide maw which topped a    |  sewn onto the pockets of his
pile of severed heads so        |  jean jacket, confederate pins
disfigured they couldn't even   |  dangling from its sleeves. 
stare.                          |  Did the teenager sit near the
                                |  black bus driver out of
He'd stuffed the heads into a   |  meanness or stupidity? 
burlap sack and left them in    |  Probably both.  The bus driver
Washington Square Park.  He'd   |  looks at the kid and smiles. 
gazed down into the opening     |  It is not often that racism is
for a quarter of an hour,       |  properly labelled.  If hatred
until blood and rot began to    |  were always this self-
satin the fabric that had       |  explanatory, you could keep
concealed them.  Then he'd      |  track of your enemies.
walked away cooly, feeling the  |
heads settle and drain.  An     |  * Demon-snakes ate Dead Sea *
extravagance, he'd thought.     |  * apples, Spitting bits of  *
Crushed peaches bleeding juice  |  * bitter ash.               *
into the grains of white        |
cobblestone.                    |  He lifts his eyes from a page
                                |  which smells of shredded
Though he'd been wandering      |  coconut.   They burned me with
away from the death site for    |  my own mind , he fumes.  They
hours, William was still the    |  always do.  Like last Friday,
unwilling recipient of          |  when he'd attempted to get
visions.  The city itself       |  into Hellbound--a club known
seemed haunted, if only by      |  and reviled for its hostile
emblems.  A gangly blonde       |  door policy.
leaned against the support      |
beam of the bus stop, her body  |  * Tell them who you are,    *
a gesture towards negation.     |  * Billy.  Glare right into  *
Free me, it pleaded.  I'd       |  * the doorman's squeezed    *
rather be dead than old.  Yet   |  * eyes.  Even if he thinks  *
William rejected its luxuriant  |  * his position amounts to a *
offer.  Lusts sated, he was     |  * royal title, even if he   *
free to reconsider fidelity.    |  * doesn't understand how    *
                                |  * power structures meet and *
Reflected neon signs hovered    |  * overlap, you won't have   *
in cafe windows like            |  * to cinch this guy a       *
superconductors of the          |  * greeting card eulogy at   *
unattainable.  They floated     |  * tomorrow's funeral party. *
beside him as he walked         |  * The people in this city   *
towards Willamette Bridge.      |  * who know your name are    *
Even outside his mind, he       |  * too frightened to slag    *
lived in a city halved by       |  * it.  They'll be holding   *
rivers.  At last crossing,      |  * back the syllables long   *
he'd been sitting in his        |  * after the current nest of *
apartment.  Then the phone      |  * celebutantes is broken,   *
rang.  It was Katherine, the    |  * and the club parasites    *
tiny speaker of the answering   |  * have flitted out of town. *
machine distorting her          |
apologies into near gibberish.  |
She'd finally gotten up the     |
nerve to call him and wanted    |
to leave her new number.        |
Instinctively, he'd risen from  |
his seat, unable to sit or      |
pick up the phone.  It was all  |
happening just as he'd          |
predicted.  After she'd run     |
away, after the infidelities    |
rumored and real, she'd         |
appeared six months later to    |
ruin his dinner date at         |
Hamburger Mary's.  And now she  |
had entered his studio          |
apartment through the phone     |
line, her stammer tugging his   |
private face.                   |

=================================================================

                                                    (Millipedes.)
=================================================================
THERE WERE PLACES  ||   ________________   ||  ...IN THE
IN ROBBIE ROSS     ||  |                |  ||  INDIVIDUAL CAN
MEMORIAL CEMETERY  ||  |"I am gristle.  |  ||  SPUMED ILLEGAL
WHICH ALBERT LIVED ||  |I am a masocide.|  ||  PESTICIDES. 
TO PHOTOGRAPH.     ||  |I am sprawl     |  ||
                   ||  |_________(con-__|  ||  There were
Often, his father  ||                      ||  gangster weddings
would discover     ||   Headpieces of      ||  in the film
snapshots of       ||  psychobiological    ||  _Cougar Love_, but
tombstones glued   ||   driftwood are      ||  the screen was
to the back pages  ||  never allowed to    ||  soon inflamed by
of the family      ||   recompose. They    ||  another kind on
album.  Small      ||  devolve on axes.    ||  uxoricide as a
wonder Albert      ||                      ||  fuselage oozed
acquired a         ||======================||  liquid Joy (and I
mortician's        ||  _Delirium           ||  don't mean the
technique, smearing||  Trampoline_.        ||  detergent). 
the lens with so   ||   Slate-gray         ||  "Insufficiently
much glycerine that||  Bassinet on         ||  synthetic--easy
even rotting       ||  window-ledge.       ||  to operate,
cities were        ||======================||  difficult to use,"
suffused with an   ||                      ||  one fan was heard
incandescent       ||  ...WAS SAID TO      ||  to glower.  Sprigs
vitality.  His     ||  CONJURE.  Seconds   ||  of ammoniated
aim was to         ||  later, a blood-     ||  cologne did little
materialize        ||  vessel broke in     ||  to alleviate the
Death's jarring    ||  Albert's jaw,       ||  lack of
detail; meanwhile, ||  spraying his gelid  ||  repetition.  Tiny
in Armenia, a      ||  lens.  This         ||  creatures with
statue of Achilles ||  resulted in a       ||  straws attacked a
was discovered to  ||  final tarnishing    ||  bag of oranges in
have been          ||  of the image:  as   ||  a sequence of
installed in the   ||  statues crack, so   ||  heart-warming...
wrong region of    ||  do aesthetics.      ||
Kodaly Square.     ||  Albert's last       ||  ...nudity.  Man,
Rude folk music    ||  words pertained to  ||  child, animated
jarred the         ||  the condition of    ||  gargoyle spitting
Apollonian         ||  his diffusion disc  ||  flecks of human
sensibility which  ||  and not his         ||  skin--all were
the Greek torso... ||  "soul."  Delusions  ||  sketched with
                   ||  of traffic packed   ||  graceful touches
                   ||  salt into his       ||  by directors Milo
                   ||  eyes, the lids      ||  & Otis.  One
                   ||  singed off like     ||  wishes this sort
                   ||  flaps of paper.     ||  of thing were
                   ||  They joined the     ||  attempted more
                   ||  ash of flesh that   ||  often, instead of
                   ||  gathered along the  ||  the disgusting
                   ||  region defined by   ||  violence which
                   ||  hills, rounding     ||  lurches into VCR
                   ||  the veranda like a  ||  doorways.  Into
                   ||  slab of nervure.    ||  graveyards like
                   ||  Awakenings decayed  ||  Robbie's.
                   ||  in the silk pond:   ||
                   ||  the filleted        ||   ________________
                   ||  Muzak...            ||  |                |
                   ||                      ||  | -tinued) whose |
                   ||                      ||  | last words are |
                   ||                      ||  | unimportant.   |
                   ||                      ||  | If only there  |
                   ||                      ||  | were terms for |
                   ||                      ||  | the trace-     |
                   ||                      ||  |________________|

The midway bristles with sparks: gridded diamonds on a red sleeve
-----------------------------------------------------------------

=================================================================
marks of my            _In The Gallery of      He feared their
fluids.  Then I        Illiterates_:           approach because
could define the                               he knew they would
matter (as if it       Awkwardly, Planer       give no pause for
mattered).  If         balanced his frame      explanation. 
only.  Never mind.     against the giant       Excuses were
Nothing can            marble scroll, his      meaningless to
protect my             head tilting into       illiterate
faculties from the     its whirlpool of        killers.  Trained
repellence of          furls.  He was          in the iconography
human contact.         trying to look          of television,
First, I invited       past the Hatchett       they could only
the pathogenic         installation, a         read stereotypical
embrace of the         plexiglass              body language.
Body.  Then I          logogriph of
explored the           carnage,                Once they'd closed
hyperstimulated        cormorants and          in on the exhibit,
minds of my            giant tortrix           Planer knew the
generation, but        moths.  His             gunmen would read
that was worse.        attention grew          him as an emblem
The interior of        lost as it snagged      of deceit.  He
the skull is           on talons and           would be framed
filthier than the      pincers, on torsos      and eye-tried with
genitals could         whose agonized          one glance from
ever hope to be.       poses were              their Emcee.  Then
The eye in the         intended to be          a nod would signal
window caresses        made abstract by        Planer's
the wind outside,      their placement.        execution.  He
and the tongue                                 didn't anticipate
evokes its lewd        The sculptures          remembrance or
itchings.  This is     were enclosed           regret.  After
what we call           within red Lucite       they'd killed, the
style  , a toilet      brackets.  These        gunmen instantly
whirlpool of bad       were part of a          forgot their
champagne which        vast equation of        victims.  Murder
attempts to drown      molded                  dwindled to
what we cannot         thermoplastic           slaughterbyte in
digest.  If only I     symbols that            their sequence of
could isolate the      progressed              waking and
illness.  But when     expansively across      sleeping.
I try, my legs         the gallery floor:
grow spattered         pliant algebra          A lifetime was a
with shit.             notations,              kind of long-
Language becomes       indestructible          running,
ajunkyard of           equal signs,            infotainment
slogans in which a     flowchart symbols       series; the mind,
gutted heart           which opened            a VCR.  Lacking
replays its            limply to the           the voice for
craving for pain.      casual visitor          questions, gunmen
Artifacts from the     beyond the gate.        were usually
crematorium snake      From the                content to get in
between my lips.       anticipated             a few good shots.
vile inflections       viewer's position,
flecked with bile.     it was the
                       Raphaelesque style
                       of the sculptures
                       that was
                       foregrounded by
                       their context. 
                       But from Planer's
                       vantage point, the
                       sculptures
                       regained their
                       urgency.  Close
                       proximity freed
                       them from the
                       distance of
                       Hatchett's ironic
                       age.  That was why
                       Planer found it so
                       difficult to
                       concentrate on the
                       progress of the
                       gunmen outside.

THE STAINED REMAINS ARE MAINLY DISEMBRAINED
-------------------------------------------

     (or waned to flame-cerise.)

                         mingled script,
                         contingency fear.

                              Excessive lace entwined 
                              her thighs.  Kinetic taws
                              of Tiger's Eye retracted
                              like sacs of amber flies.

               Her wet dreams glistened with slick-
               haired boys.  They stood in oblique

The reliquary possessed an air of disquiet.  Presences blew
through its halls like the scent of violent women.

               alley light, their Tenaxed razor-
               cuts framing thin-eyed derision.         Astro
               Heads turned slightly, girlish           sentics
               smirks twisted to depraved.  A wind      ascertai
               from nowhere scattered their             ned,
               denims.  Torsos froze in profile,        deliberat
               their icy erections nursing her          ions pro
               desire until daylight shone through      ve de-
               the brickface.  Then the boys            laned.
               thinned to transparencies.  Her          Repenta
               dad's fingers reached through the        nce cro
               loops of zippered legs and parted        nes cry
               hair.  Go away, she thought.  Don't      onodro
               fuckin' care about me.                   nes. Im
                                                        paled,
               Then Dad surprised her.  It seemed he    her vei
               wasn't so prim after all.  When she      ns lay
               ignored his commands, he pulled out a    tamely
               knife.  He raped her there on the hide-  unrestrai
               away bed, thrusting the knife tang-deep  ned. On
               into her left eye.  It had long been his tologies
               belief that pleasure and punishment must decentra
               go hand in hand.                         lized gl
                                                        ean tart
                                                        precision
                                                        s wryly
                                                        prized.
                                                        Tradition
                                                        planes
Greased with leech's gleet, Houdini                     what f
proves last repast for Pasolini.                        ilm re
                                                        gains:    
                                  the autonomic, frail terrains.

September 25, 2013

From Birdland

Rikki Ducornet

Department of English
University of Denver

They set off in the early morning beneath an auspicious sky stubbled with clouds. From the start Fogginius the Saint took it into his crazed head that he would enliven the aboriginal road and astonish his companions with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years. True to himself he did not ask if they might prefer to enjoy the beauties of the day in silence or in song, in quiet talk among themselves or in dreaming (and the poet Picotazo, as he left behind the city where his beloved breathed, was delighting in acute melancholy). After much hacking Fogginius cleared his throat and spitting into a cluster of blossoming bougainvillea began:

‘Let us suppose that upon waking in the night I trod upon a nail. The nail cruelly pierces my flesh, causing me to hop about sobbing unrestrainedly in pain. Here is the cure: take up the nail and kiss it tenderly. I bind it to my foot with a piece of nicely rotted string. Should there be a moon, I lie upon the ground with the wounded foot pointing to Heaven, a turd stuck to the toe. Within three hours, if no owl passes and nothing disturbs the silence with a scream, the wound will cease to fester. Better still, should a star stumble from the sky, the foot and the body attached to it will be invigorated beyond belief

For a brief moment Fogginius was silent. The others, greatly relieved and thinking he was done, grunted with satisfaction. This flattered the Saint and he continued:

‘Now, let us suppose that I am eating a fish and I choke on a bone. At once, without thought to economy or appearances, and no matter who is in the room–be he a humbug or God Himself–the fish’s bones, sucked clean of meat, must be placed upon my head. To assure that such a misadventure not repeat itself, my toe nails must be trimmed at once and added to the pile.’

Just then Professor Tardanza and his daughter appeared riding together in the opposite direction. They had been gathering flowering branches in the woods, and the young girl, astride a horse the color of butter, was wreathed in blossoms. So tightly was the poet’s heart squeezed in the fist of love, that had it been an orange, seeds would have bulleted from his ears.

When the girl and her father rode past the poet and the Saint, Picotazo offered his most lovesick look, a look of such intensity that if Fogginius had remained silent, she might have been moved. But the scholar opened his trap:

‘The best remedy for lightning is to wear one’s turds–dried and sewn within a piece of silk–against the heart. The turd is dry, corrupt, combustible, commemorative and, at best, cumuliform–‘

Professor Tardanza did not nod, nor tip his hat, but spurred his own horse on, frowning, as if to say: I do not approve the company you keep. His daughter kept her eyes upon the path, and bit her lower lip to keep herself from laughing.

‘That girl who just passed! Fogginius spluttered with ill- founded enthusiasm, ‘has offended some pagan deity and is being transformed to shrubbery before our eyes! Soon she will tumble from her steed and take root by the wayside…I would never have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes!’ For an instant he shut up, marvelling.

But the poet Picotazo did not hear him. He was too deep in thought. He was thinking how much he hated Fogginius and how he longed to see him dead. He wished a meteor would strike him where he sat. And although they had only just left the city of Pope Publius behind and had been journeying but twenty minutes, the poet was submerged in weariness. The day died, Fogginius the Saint silent only when catching his breath. When the party stopped and Bulto set about to roast those things he had brained for their supper, Fogginius described procedures for the procuration of corpses both fresh and moldering and methods of dissection both ancient and new–thereby destroying everyone’s appetite but his own. Cracking a baked egg against his bony knee, he entertained them with a catalog of distinctions between angels, archangels and archons, their attributes and attitudes and advantages, and the manner in which the Manicheans invoked all three; and wondered if angels had microscopic or telescopic vision, or both, or neither–but instead a type sur-natural and so inconceivable.

As Fogginius spoke, Senor Fantasma seriously pondered why he had, until now, cherished the Saint’s advice and admired his mind so much he had been paying him to think. Nuno, too, with much gnashing of teeth, recalled his stepfather’s incessant punishments, the insane blandishments which had rained unfailingly upon him when he was a boy, the times he had been constrained to wear a live lizard in his breeches, to chew sand, to eat a stew of snails cooked in their own glue. Kicking in the fire, Bulto fantasized reducing the Saint to a pulp; Pulco alone appeared content as he cleared the supper things and scrubbed a pan–he had plugged his ears with a paste of bread moistened with saliva.

‘The black man is black–‘ detonating, Fogginius threw himself upon his hammock, ‘–because his soul is an inferno, a fiery pit. He burns from within and with such intensity, all his whiteness has been consumed. The red man burns with less heat; the yellow–‘ Suddenly the world was silent.

Silent. As if a great lid of lead had been lowered from the top of the sky. Fogginius had fallen asleep, as had small Pulco, and the mules. This silence was so exquisite and so dense, that the poet attempted to seize it in verse. He wrote:

A silence like a blotter soft and thick Soaks up the forest's ink Allowing me to dream and think.

Picotazo put down his pen, and gazing up at the wheeling sky invoked in one breath the Mother of Heaven and Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Within moments he was fast asleep–as were the others, and all strung from trees like fruit damned with dreams. In his dream, Picotazo saw Professor Tardanza’s daughter threading towards him as naked as a thing of Eden. But, although she moved swiftly, she was forever far away, as if she were walking in place, or he retreating.

And then, impossibly, she stood before him. Opening his arms to receive her, Picotazo pushed his feet deep into the nebulous mud upon which he was precariously standing, to keep from falling. She was hot; before he touched her, he could feel how the air about her burned: she was poised at the center of a mandorla of fire. But just as he would embrace her, his rival Enrique Saladrigas slipped between them, and Picotazo was eclipsed by a body twice as tall and twice as broad as he. In despair he battered at his rival’s back with both his fists and at the buttocks which now pressed against his face so that he could barely breathe. A terrific stench was upon the poet now, who–the more he battled Saladrigas, the greater his rival grew.

And Picotazo was in the embrace of an outsize octopus; its antediluvian face pressed down upon his own. With a cry the poet tore his mouth from the creature’s beak, and looking to the sky saw with clarity, luminous against the ink of night, a constellation. With certainty he recognized the constellation of the skeleton. And he thought: I shall die!

The poet screamed. Waking he found that something still pinned him down. It was Fogginius. Fogginius whose dreadful testicles, so like the desiccated things he chose to carry close to his heart to conjure evil fortune, forced the poet’s lips. Revulsed nearly to madness, Picotazo bit the Saint fiercely, and Fogginius, leaping to the ground,began to shout. With loathing and amazement, and just as the sun appeared foaming upon the horizon, Picotazo listened to the Saint’s breathless explanation:

‘A cure! For rheumatism! To sit upon a poet’s face at dawn.’ And: ‘I am cured!’ Fogginius tottered and lurched about in the morning dew, arousing the many green apes which lived in the treetops. Hurled into consciousness, they responded by screeching, precipitating a billion birds into the scarlet sky– those birds which, in distant days, filled the woods with their hot, palpitating bodies, their voices like bells, the philosophical stones of their eggs.

***

Picotazo’s chronic melancholia had deepened to despondency. His dream’s sad implication, the rude awakening–illuminated the comfortless state of his love life. Looking back in time to the moment when with a lingering moan love had first flowered in his breast, reviewing each affair up to the present, he thought that never, not once, had he won his heart’s desire, known a maiden’s timid tremor, the delights of reciprocal attraction. His attempted courtships had always fallen short of their mark. Monsters of will, his mistresses had always chosen him. From the first kiss, disappointment had flagged the poet down.

With a shudder, Picotazo recalled the titanic vigor of his mistress’ constitutions, their iron clad affection, the stern, fixed stare of their lust, the fearfully earnest letters he received with terror; how faithfully they punished his evasions, the silent thunderbolts of their angry looks, the purposed damage they invariably inflicted upon his reputation when, at last, he made his escape.

The second day of their journey, Picotazo made a vow. If upon his return he could not within a week win the professor’s daughter, he would devote himself, soul and body, to poetry. He imagined himself dry and desiccated and hollow–like a pod devoid of seed–but with a great, burning body of work growing beneath his frantic pen. He would devote himself tirelessly to the epic at hand. A monument of buried pain, he would be famous beyond belief, so famous that a day would not go by without Professor Tardanza’s daughter hearing his name. In school, her children would be made to memorize his verse; the Queen of Spain Herself would visit Birdland only to hold Picotazo’s hand: ‘…whose poems are the lubrications for life’s frictions!’

But here his revery takes a perilous turn. It seems the Queen cannot, will not, let go the poet’s frail hand. Dreadfully Sovereign, as stern and fixed as a polar cap and the sacredness of Law, she ignores his mute appeal, she treads upon his feet, barks in his ear that the poet is a cog of God–and with a seismic shudder insists that he be equal to her Great Occasion.

***

Late that afternoon, the road–in truth a protohistoric path, torturous and precipitous–vanished altogether. Spying a dejection in the grass, Fogginius dismounted to see whither it pointed. The turd led them to the lip of a chasm at the foot of which the sea had hollowed a whirlpool, an eager mouth, the poet thought, entreating them, in a savage tongue, to leap.

Too tired to turn back, they set themselves down for an early supper. As Bulto built a fire and little Pulco set to dressing the small birds the thug had throttled en route, Nuno unpacked his tripod and his black box to seize the whirlpool forever with silver nitrate on glass. Picotazo kept far from the land’s edge; the sight of so deep a pit flooded his soul’s chambers with dread.

It was decided that while waiting for their food they would play a game of lotto; from his saddlebags Bulto pulled the box of painted cards which showed all manner of things: flying fish, the fortifications of Pope Publius, the garrote, the guanaba and the coconut; a poultry seller, a water peddlar, a milkman and his mules; the pyramid of Cheops; the Holy Mother,the twelve apostles, the stations of the cross; a fig, a banana and a parakeet–a game so subverted by Fogginius that by the time it was over, tempers were badly frayed. The cards called forth all sorts of associations and Fogginius could not help but recall recipes and riddles and curious customs and ceremonial sacrifices; the witch trials raging in Europe, red hens and peacock’s eyes, tigers ravening in woods, miasmatic infections, focusing instruments and paradoxes; how so and so had found gold in a graveyard which looked exactly like human teeth, and how the monks of India smear their faces with dung.

Picotazo, who, as Pulco, had taken to living with bread in his ears, missed all of this; he did not hear when Nuno cried completo! and so could not know that the game was over. This caused confusion, a quarrel and a string of complaints during which Nuno accused the poet of cheating and incivility. Oblivious to the upset he had himself caused, Fogginius gaily pointed out the prodigious vegetative power of the wood, naming the many purges and poisons he recognized–‘

‘To stick in your epic, dear poet!’ he beamed at Picotazo, ‘Proof that I have liberally forgiven you the nasty bite you gave me this morning.’

Then, grabbing Senor Fantasma by the sleeve, he postulated that the chimerical unhealthiness of the climate, its fickle temperatures and the spontaneous alterations of its air convinced him they would be assailed that night by uncommon swarms of flies, gnats, moths, animaculae and other calamities invisible to the naked eye.

‘We must sleep under nets else be plagued by troublesome bites, inflammations, noxious exhalations and velocity of the blood.’ He assured Fantasma that he had brought with him ‘mercurial purges,a gargle of borax, Armenian bole in vinegar and fungal ash. However, he would hate to have to part with any of it so soon. He insisted upon the nets else they all harvest fatality. As for himself, he would not sleep unless a net was provided; nor did he wish to see his poor friend Picotazo assailed by vampire moths. It is fortunate that Fogginius was nearly blind, for Senor Fantasma was able to provide him with a fictive net. This Pulco draped over and above the Saint who– prostrate and tightly bandaged in his blanket–was ready to sleep. Fogginius promised in a soft gurgle that he would not stir the whole night through–else tear the precious net.

As Fogginius trumpeted and wheezed, the company sat together plotting how they might rid themselves of the Saint who had turned out to be an intolerable burden. Little Pulco, himself asleep, did not hear Bulto’s offer to toss Fogginius into the precipice. Fantasma proposed poison but then retracted–fearing reprisals from the ancient’s ghost. Nuno, hating violence, revealed the central role Fogginius had played in his life and asked for mercy.

‘I’ll find a way to gag him,’ he promised. I might manage to convince him that to use the vocal chords is unnatural–the proof being that his throat is always sore–and create for his own use a language of sand, of straw, of dust motes. I’ll invent something–a muffler, a word snare, a stifler; somehow or other I’ll knot the old stinker’s tongue.’

Elsewhere, Picotazo, his ears stuffed with wild parsley, lay gazing at the sky. The world, he assured himself, was an instrument made not for pain but pleasure–else why would He have bothered? The thought was reassuring.

You are a moonbeam, he wrote to the phantom in his head, my resurrection, my future life.

But then, sensing something large sliding beneath his hammock, he was reminded that if God was anything, he was paradoxically strange.

Long after midnight the poet fell asleep–a leaky vessel upon an agitated ocean.

***

For two days, Fango Fantasma had been silent. Indeed, Fogginius’ conversation was so congested, infrangible and dense that had he wanted to, Fantasma would have been hard pressed to stick a word in, even edgewise. However, Fantasma shared Picotazo’s baleful propensity and was not eager to talk. He had taken to staring at his own reflection in a pocket mirror–not from vanity as might be supposed–but to reassure himself that he was still there. The farther away he came from familiar things, the more fragmented and permeable he felt himself to be–and the more haunted. The woods, the sea, the sky, the relic path under his mule’s vanishing feet appeared to percolate to transparency.

Fantasma’s unstable state of mind had been precipitated by a worsening pecuniary crisis. For several years he had hounded the papal authorities for permission to import Afrikans to work his mines and plantations. When at last his wish bad been granted, he spent the lion’s part of his languishing fortune to build and equip a ship, which, upon its return from Afrika, its cargo chained and bolted to the hold, had been spirited away, volatilized, sublimated–perhaps by those evil spirits which had plagued his line for three generations. It seemed to Fantasma, as the very clouds appeared to plot against him overhead, that he and his family had always been the playthings of necromancers.

The Saint had once told Senior Fantasma that in a distant region of the world, at its very edge–which was razor-sharp and swept with cruel winds–lived a people born riddled with holes like sieves. This peculiar race amused themselves by plugging their perforations with sod and seeding them with roses, club mosses and horsetails. Each spring flowers would grow, blossom and blaze. At the world’s end, courtship rituals included dances of gyring shrubs.

‘More often than not the wedding night ends in disaster,’ Fogginius told Fantasma,’ for in their frenzied embrace, the lovers–decked from head to foot in thorny briars–tear one another to shreds.’

‘Such is the way of love–‘ Picotazo, eavesdropping, was cut to the quick by the story. He made up a little list of rhymes to keep for later: thorn/sworn, latch/patch, furr/burr, thistle/whistle.

***

This night Fantasma felt like a sieve man; he felt that his substance was seeping out through the pores of his skin. To make matters worse, their finger of rock above the whirlpool–if certified by an auspicious dropping–was possibly haunted. Certain signs–caricatural boles and an abandoned wasp’s nest– implied that they had tied their hammocks between what had once been sacred trees.

As their fire died, Fantasma stretched out, and pulling on his fingers one by one until they popped, raised his knees to his chest and grabbed his parts. He thought about Nuno’s black box which would bring him power. He imagined himself enthroned upon a velvet chair, turning a crank which would yield up the island image after image.

Too agitated to sleep, Fantasma told himself the story of the nun who had neglected to cross herself before eating a banana. How, thereafter, a demon had sat behind her navel peering out at the world as through a porthole. That failing, he attempted to bring to mind the tender moments of his infancy–but could only recall those family stories which, since cognizance, profoundly distressed him. Stories of those unstable ghosts taking root, tall as trees, in the dining room, causing the roast beef to explode; hovering near the birthing chair whenever a Fantasma was born, to snap up the umbilical cord the instant it was cut. So that it was generally supposed one day the Fantasmas would all be itinerant ghosts with no worldly ties.

And then Fantasma thought he heard his own cord, and the cords of his forefathers being pulled along the ground. He moaned and clutched his balls in terror; above the roar of the whirlpool, he heard one thousand phantoms stepping among the stones.

Fantasma shivered. A clammy air rose from the ground; it mouthed his bones and caused his teeth to hammer. When the moon’s thin wafer pulled itself up over the horizon, he peered timidly out from under his blanket, thinking to catch a glimpse of the ghosts which–he could hear them distinctly–were spooking the campsite. What he saw caused him to scream with such conviction the others were wrenched from sleep to see that the world beneath was no longer solid but palpitating with hundreds of thousands of frogs which had once assured the wood’s sacred character. The indigenous population had called the place above the whirlpool Tlock. Indeed, as the frogs advanced snapping gnats with eager tongues, the party heard distinctly the percussive sound of their feasting: Tlock,tlock,tlock.

Transfixed with terror, Tango Fantasma sailed that amphibious sea howling as Bulto, more naked than any ape, waded among the little green bodies, battering them with a club. Nuno sat transfixed, Pulco wept and Fogginius beat the air and cried:

‘The magic is severe! My net’s dissolved!’ And then: ‘A dream! A dream and an oracle! We must count them!’ The Saint dropped to the ground, and fumbling among the frogs, raved: ‘Beings fallen from the sky! Bulto! Desist! You are smattering the brains of rational angels!’

They finished the night, prostrate but wakeful. It seemed to them that the entire cosmos reeked of mildew, stagnant pools, the shit of fish, the saliva of snakes and the sulphurous flatulence of Saints. Sometime before dawn the frogs vanished into thin air–supporting Fogginius’ thesis.

Several hundred years ago, on an island the aborigines had named Birdland, the mendicant scholar Fogginius was roused from the depths of nightmare by a hellish bawling.

Fogginius leapt up from his bed–in truth a worn, woolen cape sewn into a sack and stuffed with shredded shirts–and threw aside his door, or rather, the crusted board which kept the wild hogs from relieving themselves in his rooms. There upon the overturned kettle he used as a threshold, lay an abandoned human infant, soiled and with crossed eyes.

Fogginius washed the brat, stared fiercely into its transverse gaze, and in the manner of the times, swaddled it so tightly that it could not thrash but only howl–as helpless as a sausage damned with a thwarted consciousness. This done he christened it: Nuno Alpha y Omega.

***

Fogginius was disliked. A deaf man who the scholar had cured of a coughing fit by stuffing his ears with breadcrumbs and parsley daily damned him; another whose bee hives Fogginius had smeared with dung, hated and feared him. Nevertheless, up until the arrival of Professor Tardanza from Cordova, and the maturity of Picotazo the poet, he was the only scholar in Birdland, and his the island’s only library–a wormy collection of parchment-bound books stuffing a zinc-lined trunk not large enough to bathe in. The books had been packed along with that woolen cape and those night shirts which, a full three decades later, served the saint as mattress.

In his youth, Fogginius had been enthralled by Birdland’s unique bestiary. The island claimed a purple bat, whistling wart-hogs, miniature crocodiles and large albino spiders sporting pink whiskers. After many years of trial and error, Fogginius had taught himself the ambiguous art of taxidermy and so was able to save the skins of most anything he chose, although he was not an artist and was incapable of reconstructing any creature convincingly.

For example, Fogginius’ snakes did not diminish towards the tail as is customary, but instead they grew progressively fatter. So zealous was the scholar and so thorough, that all the snakes, bats, moles and mice, ant bears, crocodiles and parrots within ten kilometers of his hovel had utterly vanished by the time our story begins. Only their skins remained–thousands upon thousands of them–decomposing in sisal sacks and crowding the shadows of the room Fogginius used as library, laboratory, kitchen and bed chamber, and which the rats used as a larder. He saw to his personal needs after dark beside the path which led to a little chapel–no more in his keeping (for word of other excesses had reached his Queen). Because Fogginius cured his skins with grease, the salted livers of cats, the ashes of wild hog testicles and vinegar, his place and person smelled unlike any other. And once, perhaps in jest, perhaps the result of rare and hermetic readings, Fogginius had suggested that the saviour was a false prophet, a magician engendered by the planet Mars. He was fortunate to have escaped with his life. A new priest– Fogginius despised him–was sent to oversee the cosmic affairs of Birdland.

***

The city in which Fogginius lived had been named Pope Publius by a bishop in absentia. Its houses were of local pudding stone and coral, and well over a century old. Each had been fitted with heavy doors, high balconies and iron-barred windows–for in its early years the island had been plagued by pirates. The shops– generously fitted with closets, storage bins and shelvings, were now, for the most part, empty of everything but lizards. If Pope Publius had been prosperous for several decades, it no longer was–although one rich man remained in the city’s finest house, its spiral stairs listing and his mahogany columns riddled by carpenter ants. The walls were of imported marble, and the windows of Venetian glass.

This palace belonged to Senor Fantasma whose grandfather had been among the first to take possession of the island. Now that his inherited wealth was running out, Senor Fantasma was waiting for a shipload of Afrikans–for whom he had negotiated with the papal authorities for nearly a decade–to replace the volatilized aborigines.

Very little is known about the original population of Birdland–only that it dwelled in great baskets. As the climate of the island was extremely mild, the natives had no need of smokeholes. They cooked their meals outside in a common courtyard, fenced in by the outsize shells of clams and cockles. The small hole at the top of their huts was an eye through which they could be perceived by their curiously indelicate gods; it served no other purpose.

The aborigines were sculptors, and the mountains truffled with engravings of frogs and copulations and birdmen. They also hung huge quantities of seashells from the rafters of their basket-houses. Once, during a violent storm, these shells created a noise which so enraged Fantasma’s ancestor that he set an entire village on fire–clearing it of men and women and children and structures and domestic animals–thus making room for Pope Publius. By the time Fogginius arrived, a decade or so later, everything the indigenous population had claimed as ‘objects of memory’–an ancient clump of tufted parrot trees, a swarm of aerial orchids resembling yellow bees, a mango grove and several cultivated gardens–were gone.

Strangely, the ensuing generations of Fantasmas were ruled by an obsessive terror that something should escape them. As if that initial conflagration lingered as a fever within the brains of those to follow. This and more: both succeeding generations had a terror of shells and bones and the sound of hollow things knocking together, or clanging, or ringing upon the air. For this reason the chapel of Pope Publius was the only one in Christendom which had never been fitted out with a bell. (Because Old Fantasma had paid for the chapel’s construction, the Designated Powers were willing to overlook this aberration.)

It has been said that Birdland was haunted by the spirits or ghosts of those the Old Fantasma had wronged; that these spirits had escaped through the cyclopean eyes of the basket dwellings; that these itinerant spirits or ghosts materialized at the foot of a bed, in a chimney or in a high tree, in the privy; rode upon the wind as pollen and seeds, were precipitated during the chiming of a clock, or slept within a bottle of ink, or an imperfectly sealed letter–in other words, manifest so often that if they were not fixed residents, it was common enough to see them or to meet someone who had. So that when they did appear they created no surprise. Only Senor Fantasma went wild when haunted.

And it was said that during the construction of Pope Publius, these spirits or ghosts manifested themselves so fearlessly that Senor Fantasma’s grandmother was constantly enraged by their incessant interruptions, and drivelled on and on to anyone who would listen that although she would not allow cigars into the house, a particularly obnoxious phantom insisted on smoking a monstrous, black one in her very own boudoir. She described him: naked and fiercely hot, his shadowy particulars tattooing the walls as he galloped back and forth upon her bed’s counterpane in the moonlight, blowing smoke rings around her trembling nose and causing her love birds to throw themselves to their cage’s floor in paroxysms of emphysemic terror. To keep the infection from entering into the hollow recesses of her head, the old biddy went about her business in a veil. For a time it was feared that she had been impregnated by the smoke from the naked ghost’s cigar, but chamomile and patience proved the old lady suffered gas.

What is curious is that these were the only spirits to haunt the island. No one ever saw Senor Fantasma’s ancestors sitting in trees or smoking. Fogginius–who eagerly took down testimony from whoever would give it–and more testimony from schoolboys than one would think possible–explained the phenomena thus: heathens cannot enter heaven and must remain behind to haunt their former homes, whereas the Old Fantasmas were all Christian and had been seized by heaven whole. But Fogginius feared that if the Afrikans–for whom the entire island waited with hope and misgiving–were not baptized, their spirits, too, would flood the island–making it inhospitable.

***

Such was the world into which little Nuno Alpha y Omega had plummeted. The population of Birdland was no more than one thousand and one souls, and it would have been easy enough to discover the babe’s mother and bring her to reason. But this never occurred to Fogginius. He believed that–as worms in cheese–the infant had generated spontaneously upon his door’s stoop.

Nuno’s first spoken word was: why. He had pointed to the sun and asked of his stepfather, Why. Until then he had uttered only Fa-Fa. Other than that he had felt no need to speak, and instead with fascination watched the riot of activity within the scholar’s hovel, prodded through the havoc of pelts, skins, and keeping mediums–and attempted to make sense out of the weird stories Fa-Fa told him, those gorgeous lies he believed: that the world was flat and the excrement of bears so potent one whiff could kill an elephant. Nuno was from the start a dreamy child and already at the age of three, when he asked the question Why, he had noticed that in finite quantities the atmosphere is transparent–more transparent, even, than water– but that in vast quantities, as in the sky, it was a beautiful blue. Damned with crossed eyes, Nuno was blessed with acute perceptions. Fogginius was aware that the child was no fool, so that when he saw him pointing at the sun and heard the terrible question Why, he knew, deep within his heart, that to answer: Because God, would not give satisfaction. He loved little Nuno deeply and dared not disappoint him. And so he proposed a list, which the longer it grew, the longer it became; a list, which, like the snake biting its tail, went on forever:

‘Yes!’ Fogginius startled the infant by leaping to his feet, ‘Yes! The sun! Why? And why the moon? And the rain which falls upon our heads? And why do we have heads? And eyes placed at the top of them? Why don’t we wear our eyes–as some fishes do–upon our undersides? Why not wear an eye between our buttocks and our anus above our nose? And why, dearest little Nuno–I have often pondered this–do all the animals have faces? Turtles do, and butterflies, and ants! Why life, little one? And, O! And, O! Why, above all, death?’ Fogginius covered his own face then with his hands, and to the child’s dismay began to weep. Nuno never forgot the upset his simple question had caused and as he stood blinking and confused, close to tears himself, he vowed that he would never ask such a question out loud again. But it was too late, the cat was out of the bag. Wiping his nose with his stinking fingers, Fogginius went on:

‘Why calamities?’ His voice was hoarse. ‘And evil natures? Black choler, pestilence and the planets which rotate about the polar star? Why danger and distress? Gall, vinegar and presages of future things? Alarming flames, little Alpha, omens, anise- seeds, imprecations and enchantments? Frogs’ mouths? Falling stars? Asparagus? Eclipses? Why do birds have beaks? And if the soul disembarks at death, why must the corporal rind stay behind to corrupt the earth? And why am I so melancholy?’ Again the scholar sobbed. Little Nuno, struck with terror, sobbed too.

Little Nuno was locked inside the scholar’s sea trunk often and the injustice caused his back to hump. His body knobbed in one tight fetal knot, he clenched his teeth with rage for years until a rat poked its tongue into the greasy keyhole and a beam of light pierced the gloom.

Nuno amused himself by looking at his thumb, first with one eye and then with the other. The thumb appeared to jump from left to right and from right to left. Many hours later, when Fogginius remembered to let the boy out, Nuno tried his small experiment with the back of his stepfather’s head. He noticed how it, too, jumped, and how flat it looked. One-eyed he navigated the room and attempted to dip his pen into the inkpot. Tipping the pot over and onto his knees, he found himself lifted into the air by an ear and once more tossed into the trunk where he played the same game with the root of his nose. It perplexed him to discover that he seemed to have two noses. Seizing them with his fingers he was reassured.

Except for the tiny beam of light which collided with the back wall, the trunk was perfectly dark. Having napped now, rolled into a ball and blinking, Nuno was startled to see a projected image of the room’s one lopsided window and of Fogginius suspended before it upside down. The effect was as terrifying as it was magical.

For weeks thereafter, Nuno taunted his stepfather so that he would be punished and forced to crouch alone in the dark. An inventive child, he pocketed a lens from the scholar’s misplaced spectacles and held it to the keyhole. The image of Fogginius suspended upside down was so sharply reproduced that illumined by intuition, Nuno realized the magician was not the sordid scholar bent with pitiful patience over a heap of parrots he had reduced to trash with a savage and religious passion, but the sun itself. The sorcerer was light–not Fogginius who, if he was capable of talking from dawn to dusk, could not fry a proper egg.

Fogginius came to wonder at the eagerness with which his stepson climbed into the trunk. It came to him that the boy used its pinching privacy for purposes unclean and so severely thrashed him. But although he cried out for mercy, Nuno forgot his pain because it had come to him that he must make a miniature model of the trunk in order to discover the secret laws of holes and beams of light.

‘Just as my master thrashes and contains me when angry,’ the child reasoned, ‘and just as thunder causes it to rain, so it is possible that light reflects images.

Once Fogginius had hobbled off in his fetid rags to hunt the skins of a scarce species of violet stoat, Nuno made himself a box, pierced it with a hole, inserted, with some fuss and bother, a tube of black paper, capped it with the lens from Fogginius’ spectacles, placed a mirror inside and lastly, after much tinkering, and in an inventive fever, dropped a pane of glass into the back. Light from the little window entered through the lens, was reflected by the mirror onto the glass, which, when manipulated, produced an image of the room in sharp focus. Toying thus, Nuno stood for hours until, seeing Fogginius’ face staring at him from within the box, he was thrust back into the real with a shriek. But instead of thrashing him, Fogginius embraced his stepson.

‘You have invented the camera obscura!’ he cried, and bursting with pride, congratulated him. Nuno was disappointed to learn that the black box was not his own invention. But when Fogginius told him that painters used it to trace figures on paper, Nuno declared fearlessly:

‘A poor use for it! I would fix the image and thus do away with painters!’

‘Fix it! Fix it!’ The scholar slapped his stepson twice most viciously upon each ear. ‘I’ll fix you! Would you thus steal the world from God?’ Lifting the box above his head he sent it crashing into the deeper shadows of the room, exterminating, as he did so, an entire litter of newborn rats.

Fogginius was a compulsive describer of climates, and he was also a pamphleteer, his passion for the genre fired by bitterness and the conviction that certain winds were beneficial, moons ominous, the female pudenda perilous (a fear he shared with the poet, Picotazo). Fogginius was a man bereft of humor.

For a typical day in Pope Publius, in the month of July, 1650, Fogginius’ journal reads: Bad air. A break in the moon’s halo. By means of which we shall have a wind.

Trained by a Jesuit theologian also named Fogginius, Fogginius once sold his shoes and his books to buy a small, red topaz because his master had assured him that if reduced to powder, the stone would produce a white milk. Fogginius had also proved to his own satisfaction that the moon’s influence was moist by sleeping beneath it upon a high hill and awaking with a head cold so severe it almost killed him. He had ingested the dung of a sheep for a week, because an irresistible voice had told him that the thing must be done else the moon fall into the sea.

‘The moon’s nature,’ Fogginius wrote in a pamphlet which was published in Spain several years before his departure for the island, ‘is ethereal, aerial and aquatic.’ He was successful in his attempt to capture lunar water by leaving little dishes out on the balcony nights when the moon was full. Fogginius sold this dew to a young woman whose underarm hair was so meager it compromised her sexual attractiveness. The hair grew to such profusion that she was not married afterall, but made her living by sitting on a little gold chair on market days and raising her arms for the highest bidder. Later she returned to Spain to continue a career which, one hopes, fulfilled her wildest expectations.

***

Fogginius was a follower of Lacantius who ridiculed the theory of the antipodes. Fogginius believed the world was flat, a belief that remained unshaken despite his voyage from the Old to the New World. When as a young man his stepson, Nuno Alpha y Omega ran away with pirates and was swept by fierce winds to the Polar Circle where he and the entire crew were appalled by an astronomic night six months long, the stepson came to question the stepfather–now so gaga as to suggest to young mothers that they cure their infants’ sties by rubbing their eyes with the freshly decapitated bodies of flies. Coming into maturity, Nuno refuted Fogginius as ‘a mere dogmatizer’ and ‘God’s prattling ape.’ For Nuno had come to question more than his father; he had come to question God. Home again, he could no longer bear the company of Fogginius. So enraged, so disgusted was he by the codger’s lunacies, his vanity and his incessant pontifications, and of the thrashings with which the old fool continued to threaten his son, that Nuno became an adamant atheist, a materialist who believed only in what he could see, shunning all things which smacked of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and to understand the mechanisms which–as do the hidden gears of a music box–cause the world to spin.

In the early years of his solitude and independence, Nuno supported himself by making photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers and the wings of butterflies. These he sold in the market as amulets and, because he was a cynic, as ‘the miraculous impressions of the thoughts of kings and angels.’ Then, by means of a piece of glass painted over with tar and placed in his camera obscura, he was able, centuries before the world at large would learn of such a thing, to capture an instant in time. This first successful experiment plunged him into a chronic fever from which he never entirely recovered. His next attempt was to create an image in three dimensions. Nuno Alpha y Omega’s ocularscope was not only the first stereoscope in Pope Publius, but the first one in the universe. Thanks to this wonderful machine, a city which exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass.

Nuno’s first images were of the natural world. He would capture the exotic fauna of his native island just as Fogginius had done except that in the process nothing would die. Today, as I sit in the National Museum of Pope Publius, an unusual edifice built entirely of coral, and peer into the ocularscope‘s twin lenses, the fugitive forms of Nuno’s Birdland appear seized in silver before me. Fugitive more than adequately describes this island which, formed of mandrapore, cuttlebone and sea lime ceaselessly changes shape. If it were not for the sea wall which circumvents it, pieces of the island would be swept away in times of tumultuous weather. I have here before me the imposing forms of sea turtles sleeping by the hundreds on the beach, portraits of the powerful, the beautiful, the lean and lost; lush landscapes, the elegant facade of a rich man’s house; the image of a partial eclipse of the sun as seen imprinted on a garden path through the intercesses of the leaves of a lemon tree–a multitude of crescents as numerous as ants; and all the phases of the moon, phases, Fogginius might have said, of the same riddle.

***

Curiosities of Nuno Alpha y Omega’s island: sea cows which sailors once took for sirens. A scarlet shell sporting a white horn so poisonous that one need but see it to die. The mountains are truffled with enchanting caves, the skies with birds–many of which are mute. (But the lizards of Birdland whistle, and the beetles tick like clocks.)

According to Fogginius’ meteorological journal which lies open before me, verminous and yet for the most part intact, the summer of 1660 was so hot the hens laid hard-boiled eggs.

September 25, 2013
Five Days of Bleeding

Ricardo Cruz

Department of English
University of Illinois-Normal

PLANET ROCK

“I’m the DJ, he’s the rapper,” Chops said, pointing his big finger in my face as if the planet had just begun to spin.

It was night, and the white clouds laughed at Chops until their stomachs bust and they cried. Linton Johnson, a Rastafarian-feeling Black nigger with mustard seed, scronched down in front of our faces and yelled out that New York’s Central Park was Nigger heaven.

“Wait a goddamn minute!

“Is Nigger heaven a Carl Van Vechten novel or a cabin in the sky or a Black place or a sanctuary where August hams grow wild or haven for blues or what?” I asked.

Johnson blew happy dust in my face. “Bottle it,” he said.

Along with Johnson, there was a slew of negroes celebrating and doing their thang in the park like it was nothing. Indecent exposure, pure and simple. A Black Monday. The stock market had crashed, so niggers played the numbers once they got back to Harlem. They picked out their numbers based on Neo-hoodoo and wrote them down during the party they threw for themselves in the park.

Meantime on television: “The problem is that when these films like New Jack City play there are so few of them until Blacks flood the theatres and make a major event out of them.”

Whites gazed out of their windows and saw dinge and charcoal everywhere, dope as art, Guns N’ Roses taking over their houses sky-high above the Harlem juke-joints.

ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE

Chops’ joke was very funny, but Johnson was seriously looking for more entertainment to exhibit in the park, protest the absence of social reform, his forehead fucked up like the pavement on a bad road.

“The race problem in the United States had resolved itself into a question of saving black men’s bodies and white men’s souls,” he said.

“Are you Lyndon Johnson or James Weldon Johnson or Johnson & Johnson from Jet and Ebony magazines?” I asked. Under the moon, I passed for white.

Mr. Johnson, calm, slender and immaculate, stood on the narrow strip of stage between the footlights set up in the park and the green grass.

“The name is Linton. If you can’t say or play it, then take yourself, the girl and that little fat-ass fucker and go home.”

“Who made you head negro, Lint-head?” I asked. He ran up and pushed us into the grass, then laughed.

“That shit was cold, wasn’t it?” Johnson asked.

“Yeah, baby,” I answered. “Yeah.”

BIRTH OF THE COOL

Chops and Zu-Zu Girl were cutting up, tripping over sharp blades of wet brown grass they found in the park. Zu-Zu was singing the blues. We got up and sent Johnson off with a smile that we inverted once Johnson turned his back. We sat down on a familiar bench in the park, our boodies itching for a scratch. My cheeks slid along the hard wood. “Wiggle it, baby,” the bench said.

Zu-Zu laughed. Chops laid out.

“You got it good and that ain’t bad,” said Zu-Zu.

“Murdah in the first degree,” I told Zu-Zu.

“You can’t keep a good man down,” said Zu-Zu.

Chops was laid back, doing statues of liberty with his fingers. “Lucy’s in the sky with diamonds,” said Chops, downing a Third Stream from his bottle. He was a chaser of the American Dream.

Zu-Zu snatched the pastries out of Chops’ other hand and went off. “Straighten up and fly right,” said Zu-Zu. “Your jelly roll is good.”

The pigeons picked crumbs out of Zu-Zu’s palm. Chops offered Zu-Zu his bottle.

“Excuse me,” said Chops, “but would you like a heavy-wet, cherry bounce, gooseberry wine, fine, cold-without, Tom-and-Jerry or mountain dew?”

Zu-Zu whipped Chops with a coke stare and flicked her remaining crumbs into the trash can.

“I’d like a John Collins or blue ruin or apple-jack or black velvet or twopenny or white-ale or dog’s nose or whisky toddy or London particular,” said Zu-Zu.

Zu-Zu sung the “Laughing Song.” Then she leaned over and smacked Chops in the face, her dark nipples giving us a mean look because they couldn’t sag against her boob-tube.

I grabbed Zu-Zu’s punch and told her to stop. “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way,” I told Zu-Zu, “but this ain’t Queens or Manhattan or Long Island or Greenwich or Harlem. This downtown. You just can’t go around smacking everybody in the face. Dig?”

Zu-Zu sung “Dead Drunk Blues,” booze trickling out of her mouth. She unfastened her bra and took it off.

MERCY, MERCY, MERCY

“You sho’ is big, Zu-Zu,” said Chops. Chops was about to fly away over a bird chest. Meantime, I wondered what she was doing with a bra on under a boob-tube and how we managed to see her nipples.

“Incredible,” I said.

Zu-Zu moved over and smacked Chops in the mouth. “Bop,” she said, her boob-tube shaking a teeny-tiny bit as she danced in the park.

“I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” said Zu-Zu.

I’M SHOUTIN AGAIN

We are nomads, rebels, revolutionaries, but not homeless. I’m dancin on the benches while Chops sit and stares, his mouth open, his eyes on tits and money.

“Get up, get into it, get involved!” I yell. It’s as if I’m shouting at the tits.

Zu-Zu breaks down and does a war dance downtown, pulling her boob-tube up and down, lots of black people gathering around her and jeering.

I grab Zu-Zu around her waist and we do it to a little east coast swing.

“You can swing it, too,” said Chops.

Zu-Zu laughs and smooches with me while we slowly spin around in the soft, thick mud. “My Man-Of-War,” sings Zu-Zu, like we’re in the trenches. Then she sings “That Thing Called Love.”

RUM AND COCA-COLA

Zu-Zu was a mighty tight woman, moaning blues, caffeine and alcohol keeping her going.

“Swing low, chariot,” Zu-Zu whispered. She was ready to drop dead. She sung “New York Tombs.”

Chops, who had been collecting money in a can, came over and whispered in my ears. “What’s wrong with Zu-Zu?” he asked.

Zu-Zu was off into her own world, everybody drinking moonshine but her.

“What did I do to be so Black and blue?” asked Zu-Zu. She threw her bottle away like it was water.

“Take it easy, Zu-Zu,” I said. I dropped my bottle and gave her a warm-fuzzy.

Zu-Zu pulled back. “Don’t hug me,” she said. She was as tender as the night, black and blue bruises all over her body.

WHAT IS THERE TO SAY?

Zu-Zu peeled my fingers off her skin and turned away. She sung “In A Silent Way.”

“She’s been sleeping with the enemy,” said Chops. “She’s got it bad and that ain’t good.”

“That niggah you’re seeing is just gonna drag you down, Zu- Zu,” I said.

“I need love in the worst sort of way,” said Zu-Zu. She took off her skirt and her boob-tube for the twelfth time.

Chops unzipped his pants, pushed Zu-Zu down on the bench and hit her on the side of her face, smearing her rouge into blood. Chops jumped her bones. “Stop!” I yelled. I was afraid for Zu- Zu. Chops had white man’s disease. He could barely jump, the fat on his stomach rippled like tidal waves.

Against the two boards that made the seat of the bench, Zu- Zu looked like the heroine of a silent movie laid down on some railroad track waiting for the train to come. Chops leaped back- and-forth over her collar, his hair standing straight up like Don King’s.

Zu-Zu blew her cool. “I hate a man like you,” she said. “Are you going to jump my bones all night or take off your pants and do me?”

TOO HOT

“I can’t perform under these conditions,” Chops said. “Cross my heart and hope to die. If I’m lyin, you can take this money I collected and buy yourself a little engine that can.”

Chops pulled out a doo-rag and wiped his fat face.

“Just give me some old-fashioned love,” said Zu-Zu. “I want hanky-panky.”

Chops wanted Zu-Zu to stretch his pants but wasn’t confident he had the skills to do her. He stood still and tried to catch his breath while men with nickel-hearts came up and offered to do Zu-Zu for him.

THEY GOT TO GO

“I want to be the only one who gets it,” Chops said to Zu- Zu.

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m a mighty tight woman. Do me in a place where it’s warm and where your hooch won’t turn bad. I don’t care where you take it.”

PARADISE

“Behind the garbage,” said Chops. “Seven steps to Heaven.” Chops pulled out a bomb and lit it, weed all in Zu-Zu’s face, smoke getting in her eyes. Zu-Zu started singing “Dope Head Blues,” Chops high as a kite.

“Give me that old slow drag,” said Zu-Zu.

Chops gave Zu-Zu the bomb, and she sucked on the edges of it until it exploded in her mouth. She spat the paper out, and the ashes came out, too, like her mouth was a volcano.

“Spit in the sky and it fall in your eye,” Chops said.

“That niggah is just gonna drag you down,” I said to Zu- Zu.

Chops glared at me, his eyes like obsidian pieces. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Don’t ask me, Chops,” I said. “I’m just a jitterbug. When I hear music, it makes me dance.”

Zu-Zu became restless. She started singing “Tired of Waiting Blues.”

“I’m dying by the hour,” said Zu-Zu.

“She’s gotta have it,” I told Chops.

“Knees up, Zu-Zu,” Chops said. Then Chops fell down and pounced on top of her stomach. Zu-Zu spat in his face.

“Bring back the joys,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m a mean, tight mama.”

Chops slung off his leather and whipped her. The scorching and burning and hot fire turned Zu-Zu’s hair nappy. With a bottle of moonshine in his big, black hands, Chops looked like Prince Buster trying to make love to Zu-Zu, pastry crumbs all over her lips like caviar and ashes still coming out of her mouth. Use your imagination.

“Ooh!” she screamed. “O, Carolina! Olcum!” She called out Yoko Ono’s name as well.

Chops ran Zu-Zu along the wood while she moaned, grunted, huffed and puffed and blew into his bottle, making it blown- glass.

Two niggahs heavy on the bottle, Flukie and Sterling Silver, staggered by with a stolen television set as Zu-Zu kicked over the garbage can. They went crazy.

“Dis bruddah is tearin dis hooch up!” shouted Flukie, his mouth full of gold fillings.

“I wish I had some of that, baby doll,” Sterling said.

“You can get it if you really want it, Bro-ham,” said Zu-Zu.

Chops held out the bottle. “It’s almost all gone,” said Chops. Flukie and Sterling Silver dropped the television set, ran over and snatched the bottle of Chops’ hand. Meantime, Zu-Zu looked ’em up and down.

“Dang, girl, you sho’ is big,” said Flukie and Sterling Simultaneously. “Look at you, girl. Your stuff is all over the place.”

Chops grabbed the bottle and pushed them away from ZuZu.

“Take your black bottom out of here!” Zu-Zu cried.

“Go home!” Chops shouted.

Meantime, Zu-Zu pushed the buttons on the television set to see if she could find the niggah news.

“Keep going!” Chops shouted.

LONG ROAD

“Which way do we go?” asked Flukie, his hand directly over his cock. Sterling followed suit.

“Follow the yellow bird,” I said. They looked at me like I was crazy.

“It’s a long walk home!” they shouted. Chops gave them the finger.

They cracked up and then kissed Chops’ black ass goodbye. “See ya’ lata (chee, chee).”

WALKIN

With a cock-of-the-walk stride, Flukie and Sterling Silver followed the yellow bird to get out of dodge, Zu-Zu scrambling to pick up her stuff, Chops on top of her doing Spike Lee’s joint with his finger.

Flukie felt the urge to shine Sterling’s head. Sterling wondered whether or not Flukie was good luck. Both men were bluing, unable to get their hands on moonshine or Kool-Aid or Grape Juice or anything that looked like it could have some alcoholic content.

Flukie fell out. “It’s a dizzy atmosphere,” he said. Sterling said nothing as they passed a monk standing in a puddle at the corner and dipping while drinking moonshine.

“Don’t stand in muddy waters,” said Flukie, out of it. “Dig?”

“I’m bad,” said Monk.

Sterling Silver, in a moment of epiphany, pointed at Monk’s socks. He was floodin.

Flukie tried to play it off. “What’s that in yo’ pocket?” Flukie asked.

“Watches,” said Monk, “from yo’ momma.”

Flukie started to tag him. But, Sterling Silver held him back.

“How much they cost?” asked Sterling Silver.

“They not for sell, niggah,” said Monk.

“Then what you selling?” Flukie asked.

“Time,” said Monk. “I stole the watches from Penny’s so I could sell time. You ain’t got to buy any, but if you don’ t I’ll take you out.”

Flukie and Sterling Silver looked at one another and backed up.

“You ain’t that bad,” Flukie said.

“You don’t know nothing!” Sterling Silver shouted. “You just a pusher. You ain’t shit!”

“I’m yo’ pusher,” said Monk. “Pay me, niggahs, or I’ll close yo’ big lips forever.”

Flukie pinched Sterling Silver on the arm. “We should have stayed behind with the skeezer,” he said.

Sterling Silver cleaned his throat, then spoke up. “What do you know about karate?” he asked.

“Jujitsu,” said Monk. “Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just a punch, a kick was just a kick. After I studied the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is a punch, a kick is just a kick.”

“Damn, I’m a big niggah, but you got me scared,” said Flukie.

“Um, excuse Mr. Monk,” said Sterling, “but I have a question. That’s some deep shit you just gave us. Is that Taoism? Are you from the temple of Shaolin? Or, are you quoting from Bruce Lee’s Chapter on Tools?”

“Man, why don’t you take a chill pill, come and get blowed with us?” Flukie asked.

“Humph,” says Monk. “it’s Monk’s time. I got no papers. And LuLu’s back in town.”

“Bitches brew,” said Flukie. “Let’s go get some pussy den.”

“Die hard,” said Monk.

Flukie backed up some more. “Don’t mess wit me,” warned Flukie. “I’ll rock your world.”

“You’re out of time,” said Monk. “And after I get through wit you, I’m going back to find the skeezer and get her, too.”

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME

said Zu-Zu. “But, you sure as hell ain’t him.”

Chops exploded. He let go of his bomb and slid Zu-Zu from left to right on the wood, putting splinters in her booty. Zu-Zu screamed, caught in the middle of a wang-dang with her face under cork.

“Ooh!” she screamed. “O, Carolina. Olcum.” She threw in Olive Oyl’s name for good measure.

Chops grabbed an empty bottle and held it over his big head, Zu-Zu moaning and groaning and asking “Can Anybody Take Sweet Mama’s Place?”

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS

I rushed over and tapped the bottle against Chops’ nappy head. Chops looked at me like I was crazy, pieces of glass snagged inside his afro, blue rain dripping down his black forehead.

Chops squeezed his head with his fingers.

“Peace out,” said Chops. He fell flat on his fat face, smashing his cheeks up against the seat of the bench.

Zu-Zu picked up her boob-tube and spat on the back of Chops’ head. “My handy man ain’t handy no more,” said Zu-Zu.

I’M ALWAYS CHASING RAINBOWS

said Zu-Zu. “One minute, they there. The next minute they gone.”

MILES IN THE SKY

“Baby, you send me,” said Monk. He held two nigger flickers in his hands and put the blades together to form scissors, giving Flukie’s big head the evil eye.

Flukie’s squinted at the sight of the sharp metal. He tried to play it off. “Kronka,” he said. It meant “let the games begin.”

Sterling Silver was at the top of an elm tree, singing “Freddy’s Dead,” brothers throwing down fishbone a couple trees further away, the whole thing a nightmare.

“Man, can’t we eat?”

“Why you doing us like this?”

“There’s too many fine women walkin around for us to be in the treetops.”

“If you going to kill somebody, kill the niggah and come on.”

“Fuck him up.”

“Castrate the niggah.”

“Jack his body.”

“Use the body parts for spareribs.”

“Cut and mix.”

“Do it til you satisfied.”

“Drain the blood out like it were black cherry Kool-Aid.”

“Pump that body.”

“Niggah, you can be Blacula.”

“Have all the pussy you want.”

“Dip into anybody’s Kool-Aid without knowing the flavor.”

“Aa-a, bat around.”

“Nobody could stop you, baby.”

“Call me Bernard Wright.”

“Al B. Sure!”

“You can turn yo house into a home.”

“Take a chance, baby.”

“Cut the crap, then go back where you fell.”

“Come on wit it.”

“You just stepped into the comfort zone.”

“We up here in the trees hollywood swingin.”

“I always wanted to see the Kool & the Gang show.”

“Get off.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Take that coon out.”

“We got high hopes.”

“But, we’re not the S.O.S. Band.”

“That’s fo’ damn sho’

“No one’s gonna love you.”

“Looking like that.”

“You got to give it up.”

“Why you wanna dog me out?”

“Can’t find the reasons.”

“True devotion.”

“Look at the man in the mirror.”

“You gotta make a change for once in yo’ life.”

“You ain’t as bad as you think you are.”

“Shut up!” screamed Monk. He stabbed a tree behind Flukie’s big head.

Flukie stepped back. “Give me tonight,” he said.

From the top of the elm tree, Sterling Silver lowered his cotton handkerchief and long gold rope chain. “Hang him high,” he said to Flukie.

As if on cue, niggahs in the trees stuck their heads out of the branches and started talking smack again, twigs falling to the ground like it was nothing. It was like a mixing board where thangs jumped in and out at random.

“What’s all this noise?” said Monk.

“Look around you,” said Sterling. “What you want? You can have it, baby.”

“I need love,” said Monk. “I want an around-the-way girl. I want base.”

“We all do,” said Flukie.

“But we can work that sucka to the bone,” said Sterling Silver.

“Around the way, I saw a slim, no thicker than a twig, but with big titties,” said Flukie.

“Let us walk, and we’ll make a special delivery,” said Sterling.

“Yo’ call,” said Flukie.

“Titties taste like watermelons,” said Sterling.

“Make her come my way,” said Monk. He gave Flukie and Sterling a drink of his moonshine.

“I thought you’d see it my way,” said Flukie. He gulped whiskey and heard niggahs tripping, his head starting to ache.

“What’s all this noise?” Flukie asked.

“The sounds of 52nd Street,” said Sterling, swallowing shit from the cup as if he had found the Grail.

Flukie and Sterling took off, one step closer to Heaven.

SOUTH STREET EXIT

Miles ahead.

BLUE GRAY

Downtown, people celebrate, Linton Johnson splashing rhythms together after the thundering bass. But, there is a Blue Vein Circle where mulattoes practice color snobbery and diss the blacks. Yet, all of these people are in the park cause the earth has music for those who listen. This is Tabu. In the park, “the rhythms jus bubbling an back-firing, ragin and rising, then suddenly the music cuts: steel blade drinking blood in darkness.” Johnson records his LP for Virgin entitled “Dread, Beat and Blood.”

“It’s war amongst the rebels,” says Johnson. He’s cutting the rug and mixing the vinyl. Girls love the way Johnson spins, but he is careful to avoid the trap of stardom.

“I don’t want to be like Bob Marley,” he says. He’s got a bomb in his mouth bigger than the mike in his hands.

Chops wakes up and tries to remix Johnson’s speech. “I don’t want to be chop suey.”

Johnson grins and steps on Chops a little harder with his combat boots.

Women scream.

“I refuse to divorce myself from the realities of life,” says Johnson.

“I don’t want to be chopped liver either. Living in the bottle where everything is distorted or distilled.”

Johnson kicks Chops in the mouth. “Everybody’s got to find their own groove,” says Johnson. “You a sorry case, if you can’t.”

He holds his black thang and scratches it in front of the ladies.

His beat is so fonky: Men holler “it’s sweet as a nut–just level vibes.”

Chops pulls his upper lip away from a cleet and spits the dirt out of his mouth. Suddenly he’s starting to gain a little more respect for Johnson.

“Let the beat hit ’em!” Chops shouts. “Let the music take control! Let the beat go round & round and up & down!”

Johnson kicked Chops in the head and walked away.

Johnson is downright unfaithful. People following him as if at a golf tournament. They fight to see him, cutting out each other’s hearts and giving them to dippers with paper asses and buckets of blood. Everyone is high on brew or drawing a pound or two of kally, Johnson passin naturals on niggahs. Black boys stand in the weed and hold their dicks. Niggahs for life.

I WANNA THANK YOU (FOR LETTING ME BE MYSELF)

I told God. I told him good.

“God,” I said. “God, please don’t let me spend the rest of my goddamn life in this park. If you gotta take me, take me to higher ground. But, please don’t let me go in the park.”

“God,” I said. “You are the man. You are the man. You are the man. I want muscles.”

I gazed around to look at New York.

PRETTY CITY

But, it wasn’t the promised land.

Shawon Dunston grew up in Brooklyn. Now the niggah’s playing baseball in Chicago.

Eddie Perry was from around-the-way, Harlem, but after he moved the crowd to go to school, Exeter, he was shot by a white undercover cop and quit it.

MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE

said Zu-Zu. “You shall reap what you sow.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I can’t be no ordinary Mo. I got to get out of the ghetto, too. If I live life by tripping, at least I did it my way.” I got this Frank Sinatra song in my head.

Zu-Zu rolled Chops over and spat in his face.

“He got it good and that ain’t bad,” said Zu-Zu. “You chopped his fat head into pieces.”

“Sing sing prison,” I said.

“Someday, Sweetheart,” answered Zu-Zu.

AFTER TONIGHT

I said, “I’m a dead man.”

I covered Chops’ body with a blanket. Zu-Zu spat once more in his face.

“Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way,” I said to Zu-Zu. “But, this ain’t Soho or Staten Island or Tribeca or Brooklyn. This is downtown. And we way down. You just can’t go around spitting in niggahs’ faces. I ain’t eighty-sixin no more niggahs for you. Dig?”

Zu-Zu cracked up. “I killed him first,” she said.

She pulled a set of lines out of her shoe that looked like Chops’ forehead peeled from the bottom of her foot and did a little number.

“I am the laughing woman with the black black face,” said Zu-Zu.

“Lighten up, honey,” I said.

“Living in cellars and in every crowded place.”

“Get it together.”

“I am toiling just to eat,” she says.

“When life gets cheesy, you put on the Ritz.”

“And I laugh,” said Zu-Zu.

“Fine and dandy, Zu-Zu, except you forgot one thang. You ain’t a woman but rather a confessional little girl who ran away from Queens umteen times before you finally escaped or so you say.”

“Why you gotta call me out?” Zu-Zu asked. She scooted over on the bench and kissed me on the lips, leaving a taste of wild cherry in my mouth.

“My daddy likes it slow,” she said.

“You don’t know what love is,” I told Zu-Zu.

“Sweet rain,” she said.

“Things ain’t what they used to be,” I said. I dreamed of chocolate Kisses. And mumbling.

“Such sweet thunder,” Zu-Zu whispered in my ear.

I flew to move away from Zu-Zu. Her heart was a singing bird. Everytime it fluttered, it gave me Flack–“The Closer I Get To You,” “Oasis” or “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

“What are you singing this time, Zu-Zu?”

“The Song Is You,” she answered.

“What’s wrong with ‘Paper Moon’ or ‘Kind of Blue’ or ‘Hand Jive’ or ‘Emotions’ or ‘Forms and Sounds’ or ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ or ‘Sara Smile’ or ‘I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I’ve Got’ or ‘Dat Dere’?” I asked.

“No more talk,” said Zu-Zu. “For me, life is like the black plague, the bordellos in Bedford-Stuyvesant full of disease that the white man carries back home to Bensonhurst, Queens, and gives to his wife.”

“We’re bigger than life, Zu-Zu.”

“When women talk that way, we dye,” said Zu-Zu, “our lips dark.”

MOOD INDIGO

All we ever do is talk.

Like flatliners, we die several times. But, we keep coming back for more.

“I can’t do no more,” said Zu-Zu. She’s lying her ass off.

“Hush, girl, be quiet,” I said.

IF I COULD SAVE TIME IN A BOTTLE

Zu-Zu got a bottle in her hands and a lake in her mouth. It rained for hours in the park before night stole our faces and painted them blue in watercolor. I wore the mask, Zu-Zu dragging me through the mud, everyone celebrating and stomping on muddy waters even after the thrill was gone. The music cut, our dark faces bleeding through our masks.

The small trees in the park were bent, dropped by big niggahs and east rains that slashed their arms and legs like it was nothing. During the storms, the trees twisted and shook and danced in the wind, their leaves like hair washed with no soap and black water.

New York stood tall as a dirty city with a mouth the size of Frank Sinatra. Zu-Zu and I sat on the bench, our shoes heavy with mud, and ate crab apples, Zu-Zu’s stomach wining and dining her until she finally belched.

New York was a home where men and women ate alone in public and nobody talked. Zu-Zu smoked a cigarette from the garbage and blew cool mint in my face. Then, she spat pieces of cigarette paper out in the sky as if she were throwing up a fistful of dollars.

Zu-Zu reached inside her blouse, wondering if she any money left. I sat on the bench with a box of Kool, singing “woman don’t you know with you, I’m born again.”

It was time she knew.

“Time,” I told her.

“Time,” she stopped.

New York was a dirty city with a mouth as big as Frank Sinatra’s, but nobody ever talked.

“No more dancing girl Zu-Zu?”

Zu-Zu shook her head, “No.” Her soul had already flown south for the winter.

Zu-Zu pulled a handgun out of the garbage can where she stored her stuff and raised it to her head.

Black Monday was the first day of autumn. The fall season came with a bang.

Zu-Zu dropped to the ground and fell out.

“Toy gun,” said Zu-Zu. She cracked up. She showed me the black plastic handle.

I handed Zu-Zu some fire, and we burned while lying in front of one another on the bench.

PURPLE HAZE

I sucked my joint, blue-faced, dragging like Jimi Hendrix with a guitar pick hanging over a bottomed-out lip. We smoked all the grass we could find. Heaven was a smoked-up black skillet holding the earth together, Zu-Zu toiling in the soil. The sky was pasta-red. The low clouds puffy and stuck together like cooked macaroni shells.

Behind the haze, the skyline felt blue, niggahs walking around on depressants and dressed like starving artists. Some brother even claimed he did J.J.’s paintings in Good Times.

I watched the brother walk away, then turned and looked at Zu-Zu. She was dope.

NEFERTITI

There was swinging on 52nd Street. Zu-Zu listened for it, Zu-Zu in pursuit of the 27th man, gold as plentiful as dust on the street.

Zu-Zu was octaroon, 1/8 negro, her hair worn in cornrows. Most people couldn’t tell if she was white or black. Her family was from Queens. One day she woke up and threw away all of her money and moved into Central Park.

“Goodbye, mother. Goodbye, Bojangles. Goodbye, heartache,” she said.

Her daddy had the nerve to cry. “God bless the child who’s got his own,” her daddy said the day Zu-Zu ran away for good. Ramseys Bojangles Girl hated her for not being a boy. He tossed his sandal behind her.

“The day I see yo’ face again will surely be the day you die,” said Ramseys.

“Goodbye heartache,” said Zu-Zu. It could have been “good morning.” Zu-Zu was the only one who knew for sure.

As Zu-Zu told me her story, we sat drinking moonshine and collecting Zu-Zu’s stuff together. Inside I was crying, Zu-Zu’s black-and-blue face half-white under the moon.

STELLA BY STARLIGHT

“Now was it goodbye or goodbye morning?” I had to know.

“It was blue cellophane over my nose and mouth, easy living, my foolish heart, a frame for the blues,” Zu-Zu answered. She was referring to life with her family in Queens before she was exiled.

“What did you say when left that hot house?” I asked.

“I sung ‘It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday,’” said Zu-Zu.

Zu-Zu stood up to straighten her boob-tube for the hundredth time. It was like watching a nudie flick. I looked up to Zu-Zu while white popcorn and seeds dropped from her colored bust to the bench.

“You got a lot of nerve, Zu-Zu.”

Amazing. How in the hell did she get popcorn inside her boob-tube, I asked myself, wondering why it wouldn’t just fall out. Zu-Zu picked a yellow umbrella out of the trash and opened it up.

“Put this over your thang,” said Zu-Zu, using the wet plastic to keep me from mooning. She was inventing prophylactics.

EVIDENCE

Once, Zu-Zu crushed a Styrofoam cup and stuck it inside my pants. Zu-Zu got on her knees and begged me to let her feel the cup.

PRAYER FOR PASSIVE RESISTANCE

“Please baby baby please,” Zu-Zu whispered. Singing “Don’t Be That Way,” she glared at Heaven.

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE,

Zu-Zu.

“What’s your problem?”

“My blue heaven,” Zu-Zu replied.

“Blue heaven is full of coppers,” I told Zu-Zu.

“Conception,” she said. She kicked Chops’ fat stomach and spat once more in his face.

TOW AWAY ZONE

Zu-Zu flagged a cop and pointed towards Chops. “Get this fat fucker out of here!” she shouted.

The cop looked like who-me.

“Yeah, I’m talkin to you,” said Zu-Zu.

The cop glanced at his black lizards to see if he was standing in muddy waters.

“You with the blue uniform.”

The whistle dropped out of his mouth.

“You with the big stick and gun on your hip.”

He called for help.

“That’s right,” said Zu-Zu. “Bring your buddies.”

The copper came up to Zu-Zu with two other blues. “I’ve never had a thang blacker than you,” he said.

Zu-Zu smacked him in the face. “Wake up, white boy,” said Zu-Zu. “You stepped out of a dream.”

“Pick up your trash, you black dog,” said the copper. Just like that. “How would you like to marry Liz behind bars?”

“Don’t try to punk me,” said Zu-Zu. “Do your job for a change and take this overweight lover to pig heaven.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Charlie Irvine.

“He’s dead.”

“What happened?”

“He tried to fuck me but got smacked on the head by a bottle.”

“No wonder he’s dead,” said Charlie Irvine. The coppers chuckled.

“You’re funny,” said Zu-Zu, “but your thang is too small to be cracking those kind of jokes.” With her index finger and thumb, Zu-Zu showed him about an inch of air.

“Take care of the body yourself,” said the cop. “The spook can rot there in the earth for all I care. I can’t tell him apart from the dirt and mud anyway (hee, hee).”

Chops woke up and gave him the finger. “Fuck you,” he said. He covered his mouth so the cop couldn’t hear him.

MOMENTS LIKE THIS

AFTER YOU’VE GONE

I said, “You’ve come back as lemon drop.”

Chops was bitter.

“Eighty-six all that,” said Chops. “I’m gonna take you out once and for all.”

“About that bump on your head, Chops. I had to do it. You was out of control.”

Chops’ eyes went to the back of his head while he rolled around in the mud, trying to get up. “When I get through with you, you gonna wish you were back in Compton,” Chops swore, “yo’ ex-wife and niggahs chasing you from Carson to Crenshaw.”

“Shut up!” I said.

Zu-Zu laughed in his face.

Chops did a circle with his fingers and then pointed to Zu- Zu’s skirt. “I’m gonna tear it up,” he promised.

Zu-Zu spat in his face. “You done lost your good thang,” she said.

Chops got up on his hands and knees and then fell back down. “The world is spinning,” said Chops, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Quit talking smack and go to sleep,” said Zu-Zu. “Your head has gotta be killing you.”

Chops closed his eyes and groaned. Minutes later, we heard him snoring.

CONFIRMATION

“Did you really live in sunny California?” Zu-Zu asked.

I shook my big head as if it were a beach ball being blown by a basement breeze.

“Who are you really?” Zu-Zu asked. “Fess up.”

“I’m Jerry Butler, Count Basie, too legit to quit,” I said. “I couldn’t fall in love with a woman, so I left Compton and came here. When we met at the Metropolitan Museum, I was eating a ketchup sandwich and trying to save myself from the cold, waiting for a train to go through the desert and back to California.”

“Nothing is sadder than the man who eats alone in public,” said Zu-Zu.

We sat talking and smoking dope from the pipe like a tribe called quest.

LONELY BOY

Zu-Zu said, “That’s what you are.” She grabbed my hand, twisted it and we ran several yards to a pale blue tent in the park in search of our future.

SKETCH 1

There were earrings and cheap gold-electroplated costume jewelry and colored scarves and doo-rags and shawls and dolls and poultry and blue racers all over the ground. On a coffee table stained by black coffee, Zu-Zu squeezed a 60-watt lightbulb in a lamp with no shade. A very Black woman fixed Zu-Zu good, turning on the light, holding her hand on the bulb and asking her what she wanted.

“Let go of my hand!” Zu-Zu screamed, the hot bulb burning her skin into a darker shade.

The gypsy woman finally let go. “What’s the matter, bitch? You feeling a little hot?”

“What yo’ problem?” Zu-Zu asked. “You want my man?”

“Shut up, yellow-ass bitch. Nobody likes you anyway. If I wanted yo’ man, I’d take him. Everything I want, I take it. That’s how I am. There ain’t nothing you can do about it. I’m the boss. And I own a doll for every niggah in this park. I can put a spell on you in a minute. Make you mine. So shut up before I find your own personal mojo and give it that whip appeal.”

“Enough with that voodoo shit,” I said. “We ain’t marked for death. If I was Steven Seagal, I would break yo’ bones so you could hear the sound of them cracking.”

“I would be out for justice then,” said the black woman. “It wouldn’t make any difference,” I said. “I’m hard to kill.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I know how to take out the garbage.” “She’s wacked,” said Zu-Zu. “Let’s blow this joint.”

“Not so fast, Zu-Zu. If this bitch has got something to say, let her say it.”

“I can read you your fortune, but it’s gonna cost you a lot of motherfuckin money,” she said. “You got to pay to play.”

“Here’s twenty dollars, whore–make it good,” I said.

GYPSY WOMAN

My black ass. I turned around and looked for a seat.

“Where are we?” I whispered to Zu-Zu.

“Don’t talk, just listen,” said Zu-Zu.

“Let me look into my crystal ball,” the black woman said. She gazed into the light bulb, the light giving her a headache.

“Damn,” she said. “You goin have to wait a while. The spirits are tripping.”

“She’s higher than all of us,” I whispered to Zu-Zu.

“You want your future told or a muzzle on your mouth?” she asked.

“I paid for mumbo-jumbo,” I said.

“Where did you get the money from anyway?” Zu-Zu whispered. The black woman ignored us. She shuffled a deck of tarot cards, laid five cards out on the table and then turned one over picturing a faceless man with an ax on his shoulder.

She screamed. “Fear death by chops!” she said.

SPEAK NO EVIL

“Black woman,” Zu-Zu warned, “I’ve killed niggahs for less.”

The black woman handed Zu-Zu a leather string of dangling rubbers, signifying the phallus.

“Take this talisman and wear it round yo’ neck,” she said. “Use it to fight the powers that be.”

“You tryin to be funny or something?” I asked. “You don’t care about her.”

“I ain’t got to care,” she said. “That’s yo’ job. Now get out of here. I’m tired of looking at you.”

HAVE A NICE DAY

Bitch.

TROUBLE EVERYWHERE I ROAM

I looked at Zu-Zu, the talisman around her neck as we walked nervously away.

“Why me?” I asked. I thought about the woman I left behind and the fact that maybe Zu-Zu would never give up any, no matter how nice I was.

We strolled below the trees in silence.

NOW’S THE TIME

Flukie told Sterling Silver, their raw hands snapping off twigs at the top of an elm tree.

“Shut up,” Sterling Silver whispered. “This ain’t a concert for cootie. Speak low.”

“Let’s jump her now,” Flukie muttered.

“Be patient,” said Sterling Silver. “We will.”

IN THE SMALL WEE HOURS

“We ain’t got all day,” said Flukie. “If we don’t get her, it’s our asses.”

“It’s yo’ ass,” said Sterling Silver. “You the one that thought up this shit.”

“We ain’t got to keep our promise.”

“There’s no way we can hide,” said Sterling Silver. “Not with that niggah loose.”

Sterling Silver tried to look down the inside of Zu-Zu’s boob-tube. “Let’s just do it and get it over with,” he said. “The sooner the better,” said Flukie. Sterling Silver could see Zu-Zu’s titties. “Word,” he said.

He and Flukie sat on the heavy branches, emulating dark shadows. No way Zu-Zu could have seen them hovering over her big head like buzzards.

Flukie started thinking about his momma. “If they laid a finger on my momma, it’s over,” he said, fiddling with the red doo-rag on his head so the leaves couldn’t fuck up his wave.

Sterling Silver watched Zu-Zu smear cocoa-butter on the soft spot of her hand where the gypsy had warmed her up like a chicken bone. “Word to the muther,” said Sterling Silver, recklessly eyeballing Zu-Zu’s honey-brown thighs while she bounced, her hips singing “Streetwalker blues.”

Flukie snatched a pointed stick and aimed it at Zu-Zu’s chest. “I put a spell on you,” he said, glycerin and activator gel from his doo-rag dropping slowly on Zu-Zu’s back.

THE MIDNIGHT SUN WILL NEVER SET

Zu-Zu started singing “Vampin’ Liza Jane,” the moon’s glow fully cast upon her now since it was after midnight, the girl seemingly pale from fright night, fog developing by her feet.

“I will cheat death the same way I do a spade in a tabletop game,” Zu-Zu said.

“You will live forever,” I said. We strolled past a water fountain, Zu-Zu looking back at it.

“Do you hear laughter?” Zu-Zu asked.

“I hear the trippin’ and ailing of the gods being cheated by you and your queens and kings,” I told Zu-Zu.

“You a lying motherfucker,” she said. She spat in my hair.

“Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way, Zu-Zu. But if you gonna spit like that, save your breath for a niggah that’s worth it.”

“Did you spit on me?” Zu-Zu asked.

“Hell no,” I said.

“What’s all this shit on my back then?” Zu-Zu asked.

“Droppings,” I said.

We stood and looked at each other. Zu-Zu gazed down at the fog by her feet.

“Enough of this Ten Commandments stuff,” said Zu-Zu, feeling her heart.

MY FUNNY VALENTINE

“Kiss me, and I’ll kiss you back,” I said to Zu-Zu, every Tom, Dick and Harry in the park trying to get her.

“Let’s wait awhile,” said Zu-Zu.

“I want you,” I told Zu-Zu. “And I want you to want me, too.”

“What you won’t do for love,” said Zu-Zu, feeling herself for a pulse.

“Let’s get it on,” I said.

“Keep on truck in’,” said Zu-Zu.

“We got a love thang,” I said.

“You can’t hurry love,” said Zu-Zu, trying to see herself in a wine bottle.

“You can’t hide love,” I said.

“I’m a private dancer,” Zu-Zu said, “dancing for money.”

“Baby love,” I said. “I ain’t got nobody.”

Zu-Zu watched as a mosquito bit my neck. “Ain’t nobody better,” she said.

I slapped the mosquito with one hand and it dove off my neck, doing a full-twisting somersault with about a 3.5 degree of difficulty. It looked up at me from the ground.

“What do you think?” it asked.

“Got to give it up,” I said. I put my foot down. “C’mon, Zu-Zu, take one helluva of a chance.”

Zu-Zu was not paying attention. She kept looking around, noticing that everybody had suddenly vacated the park.

“What happened to all the spooks?” Zu-Zu asked.

GHOST TOWN

“Take anything you want,” I said. We walked over to a trash can and dug up a couple of black western costumes, Zu-Zu throwing everything to the ground.

“You got a gun?” she asked.

“Yep.”

I showed it to her. She turned and looked the other way like it was nothing.

“You want it?” I asked.

Zu-Zu popped me on the head. My knees buckled, Zu-Zu sticking her pretty face between my bowlegs.

“Giddy-up,” she said.

I got myself back together. “Where are the clowns?” I asked.

“Get up!” Zu-Zu shouted. Her neck was caught between my legs, glad that they weren’t clippers. She had always been told that the L.A. Clippers were bad.

“Get off!” Zu-Zu shouted.

“Why you sweatin’ me?” I asked.

Zu-Zu rolled her head, trying to shake out the cobwebs. “I’m foggy,” she said.

I stepped to her smooth and direct. “Yippee-ky-yea,” I said. “I’m the fastest gun in the west. Let’s do this with a quickness and get it over with. Let’s do this like bam after a glass of whiskey.” I slung my gun around and opened up the cloth cape I was wearing.

Zu-Zu spat in the dirt. “You must think you Superman or Clint Eastwood or hard to kill. You got to have a bigger gun than that to do me. You couldn’t shoot Melba Moore with that. Melba toast would have nothing to worry about. You couldn’t knock a hole in a slice of brown bread. Even if you knew how to shoot, your six-shooter ain’t loaded.”

“I can pull the trigger,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Zu-Zu asked. “Gun jammed?”

“All it needs is a little lubrication.”

“Lubricate it yourself,” said Zu-Zu, digging deeper into the trash. “What I want is a shot of whiskey. The only way you’ll do me is if I’m drunk and slobbering over you like a saloon gal.”

I drew a bottle of Jack Daniels from the can with a little booze left in it.

“Check you out,” said Zu-Zu. “You like Mr. GQ Smooth now.”

“Yep,” I said, industrial spurs spinning around on my black dingo boots like throwing stars mowing the grass.

“Don’t touch me,” said Zu-Zu, staring at my spurs like they were wheels of fortune.

“Shut up, Zu-Zu. This ain’t Dodge City, and you ain’t Kitty. But even if that fog was gunsmoke, we’d still be in trouble cause that’s how we’re living. Saddle up so we can split this ghost town. I feel like Matt Dillon in love with a skeezer.”

“Johnny,” said Zu-Zu, “you’ve come back to me.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?”

Zu-Zu pointed at an inscription on the handle of my gun. “Why Johnny, you can’t read.”

I waved goodbye with one hand.

“Five-card stud,” Zu-Zu said.

“Five fingers of death,” I replied.

Zu-Zu started shouting: “Johnny’s got a gun, and is goin’ cap a woman. A 22-year old motherfuckin’ punk with an AK-47 he paid 18 hundred for and a vow to himself that he’d rather be in jail than six-feet under. He’s a black cowboy, roping cattle and catching dogies in a pair of rawhide boots instead of killing for a pair of Cons.

I did a few tricks with my gun and pointed at Zu-Zu’s booty. “Out here, everybody got a piece,” I shouted.

WARM VALLEY

“A little closer,” said Sterling Silver, waiting in the tree until he could see straight down Zu-Zu’s boob tube and into her drawers.

TALLEST TREES

They started talking smack. “Why is it the tallest trees are climbed by the littlest niggahs?” they asked themselves.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Flukie.

The tree dropped Sterling Silver and Flukie in the dirt, their big heads rolling through the mud and down the prairie until they crashed into my boots and stopped, their faces stuck on my toes like black olives stuck onto toothpicks.

Zu-Zu cheesed. “Howdy, boys,” she said.

“Who are these guys?” I asked Zu-Zu, like she knew.

“Guess,” said Flukie.

“Gucci,” said Zu-Zu.

“No, I mean guess who we are,” said Flukie.

“Amos and Andy,” I said.

“D.J. Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince,” said Zu-Zu.

“Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall,” I said.

“Chuck D and Flavor Flav,” said Zu-Zu.

“What are you, stupid?” asked Sterling Silver.

“Give you a hint,” said Flukie. “We villains.”

“Batman and Robin,” said Zu-Zu.

“Lone Ranger and Tonto,” I said.

“Shut up,” said Sterling Silver. “This ain’t Jeopardy or Name That Tune.”

“Whatever happened to Name That Tune?–I used to like that show,” Zu-Zu whispered.

Flukie stood up and waved his gun at my mouth. “Don’t fuck with him,” Sterling Silver said. “He’s got a trigger-finger.”

“What do you boys want?” Zu-Zu asked.

Sterling Silver would not talk to her. “Give us the girl, Bronco Billy, lest your balls are in double jeopardy.”

“Don’t do anything nutty, homey,” said Flukie. “This is fifty-eight magnum. It can blow your head clean off with one shot. If you don’t believe the hype, go head and make my day, Billy boy.”

“Step off,” said Zu-Zu. “Every dog has his day.”

“Stop that cow from chewing,” Sterling Silver told Flukie. “She got a mouth bigger than Aretha Franklin but sings like Omar Shariff.”

Zu-Zu looked shamed and insulted. “Take care of ’em for me, Johnny,” she said.

“Alright, Billy The Kid, it’s your show,” said Sterling Silver. “Are you gone give us the girl, or do we have to take her?”

“Where you want your bullet, homey?” Flukie asked. “This fifty-seven magnum is gettin’ awfully itchy.”

Sterling Silver peeped at Flukie. “When you gonna get your GED?” he asked. “You don’t even know what kind of gun you got.”

“Fuck you,” said Flukie. “I tell you what. I betcha’ I know the number of times I had my dick sucked.”

Zu-Zu spat in his face. “You’re disgusting,” she said.

“Yep,” said Sterling Silver. “Now let’s get on with the show.”

“You bad,” I said. “Go ahead and do something.”

“Bad,” said Flukie. “Three syllables. B-A-D.”

“Shut up, Flukie,” said Sterling Silver. “This ain’t Romper Room.

“Damn–whatever happened to Romper Room?” Zu-Zu whispered. “That was a great show.”

“This bitch thinks she’s in Kansas with her dog Toto,” said Sterling Silver. “I can’t wait to do her.”

Flukie walked up and grabbed Zu-Zu’s tit, grinning from ear to ear.

“You so ugly you scared all the crows away,” Zu-Zu said.

The tallest elm trees kneeled and said a prayer for Zu-Zu.

TAKE THE “A” TRAIN

Flukie grabbed his crotch and stood in Zu-Zu’s face. “Oh, so you a livery-bitch,” he said. “How would you like to come service me? I’ll whip that weak ass into shape.”

Sterling Silver chuckled. “Look, Flukie. She can let it go, and, like dust, that rickety booty is gone with the wind. Chee, chee.”

“Enough talk,” I said. “Draw.”

Flukie searched his baggy pants for a pen or pencil or etch- sketch.

“Shoot,” Sterling Silver shouted. “Finish this kindergarten cop before I get mad and blow away Monk’s girl.”

“Draw,” I said.

“Smoke him,” said Sterling Silver.

“Draw,” I said.

“I ain’t got no papers!” Flukie cried.

Sterling Silver whipped Flukie with a coke stare. “What are you, caining or something? Take that boy out and smoke him!”

“See ya,” said Zu-Zu. She gave me that cheek-to-cheek comfort and then moved the crowd.

We stood silent in a triangle, each man beginning to backpedal, drawing lines with their feet.

THEME FROM THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

It was early morning. We stood recklessly eyeballing one another, our hands covering our guns.

“This feels good,” said Flukie, the zipper open in his baggies, his big head surrounded by shadows under the armpit of a tree.

“What’s up with all this black?” said Sterling Silver, pointing his index finger at me as if it were filled with a shitload of mean bullets.

“Good guys wear black,” I said. “So why you wanna dog me out?”

“It’s the ho we want,” said Flukie. “Give us the ho and we’re outta here lickety-split.”

“With a quickness,” Sterling Silver added. “Otherwise, you’ll get a taste of these silver bullets.”

They took a few more steps back. I spread my cape and showed them my holster, running my fingers over the encased bullets like they were a line of condoms. “Shoot,” I said.

Sterling Silver squinted. Flukie started getting nervous, his hands sweating.

“Let’s go,” said Flukie.

“Why you sweating me?” Sterling Silver asked.

“No more talk,” I said.

The theme music played as we backed up even more, standing with our legs apart. Flukie started checking out me and Sterling Silver, his trigger-finger twitching, sweat on his brow, his clothes sticking to his skin, his Reebok Pumps leaving footprints in the dirt and mud and jacking him up to stand tall. He jerked on his penis some more to stay hard and cool.

“When the music stops, you niggahs are dead,” I said.

The theme music played. Sterling Silver stood where I could barely see him, his big lips singing Michael Jackson’s song “Bad,” his dark figure shaded by trees, his right leg crooked, his black belt sportin’ a silver buckle, his dirty hands moving over the buckle, his black hair cut into a V at the back, his teeth rotten. He stared around for a black hat. When he couldn’t find one, he pulled a bent silver spoon out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth.

“When the music stops, hasta la vista, babies.”

As the music played, I put a bubble gum cigar in my mouth and chewed on it, quickly working my way down to the butt. Flukie took off his doo-rag and used it to wipe his face, StaSof beginning to roll down the side. He wrung the rag for several minutes and then put it back on his head. He stood erect in muddy waters, acting like a laughing hyena to try to play off his nervousness.

“Watch where you shoot those silver bullets,” Flukie said to Sterling.

“Die, you dog!” Zu-Zu shouted from somewhere.

Flukie looked behind himself to see if there was a cemetery there, a tombstone marked “unknown.”

“What’s the girl name?” he asked.

I picked up a rock and wrote on it with a crayon. Then I threw the rock back down and opened my cape a little more, the butt falling out of my mouth, my eyes squinting, the musical chimes beginning to slow down, Flukie staring at the rock like it was gold, Sterling Silver covering his precious buckle and pretending to be Ready For The World singing “let’s get straight down to business.”

DAY-BREAKING BLUES

A fine-ass woman walked by tripping. “Can’t we have one day where there ain’t no fighting?”

SPUR OF THE MOMENT

“Thing,” said Zu-Zu. She was jealous. She saw the woman checking me out.

PEACE

“I ‘m outta here,” the woman said.

SO WHAT

“Nobody asked for your two cents anyway,” said Zu-Zu.

BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE

As the chimes winded down, we felt for our guns–Sterling Silver’s face black, Flukie staring at the rock and wiping the glycerin off of his brown lips, Zu-Zu shouting that a gunfight would kill a light-skin niggah like me.

That’s what I liked about Zu-Zu. She was always looking out for me.

“It’s over,” said Zu-Zu. “You don’t stand a chance.”

“Be optimistic,” I said. The line was from The Sounds of Blackness.

“I like their concept!” Zu-Zu shouted. “Very positive! They got some strong black men and women!”

“Yep,” I said. I spat a chaw of gum out and let it hit my boots. I wished that it had been baseball card gum instead. It cost more, but the cigars were stale.

“Hubba-Bubba,” said Zu-Zu, “it looks like this is your last dance. I hear footsteps, niggahs scattin’. It’s all bop to me.”

“Boplicity,” I said. “These niggahs ain’t shit. The situation looks deeper than what it really is. It takes two to tango. Don’t make me over. Me and you got more bounce to the ounce. I can jam. When the popping starts, yoyo get funky.”

I threw Zu-Zu a weak shovel. “Dig,” I said.

“You talking to me?” Zu-Zu asked. Flukie pulled his hand out of his pants.

“Yep.”

“I can’t believe you,” said Zu-Zu. “You’re sugarfree. Instead of being a good guy, you acting like A Rage in Harlem. One minute, you’re nicey-nicey. The next minute, you treat me like my name was Slim.”

“Shut up, bitch!” said Flukie.

Sterling Silver cracked up again, breaking up into pieces, the spoon going shake-shake-shake in his mouth, his cheeks stretched out like he was the Joker. “Tell me,” he said, standing in the dark. “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

Here was a man who gave up being brown and beige.

DARN THAT DREAM

Black must have been all he ever wanted to be.

KOKO

Hot chocolate.

BODY AND SOUL

The mouse and the man.

RUDY A MESSAGE TO YOU

“Two sevens clash,” I said. “Things a come to bump. I’ll wear you to the ball. Rule them, rudie. [I pointed to the melee of cowhands surrounding Sterling Silver.] Be Prince of Darkness, but if you can live, if you can live, if you can live…pray for me, man.”

SILENT PRAYER

Sterling Silver refused to say anything else aloud. Flukie’s fingers started twitching. Zu-Zu sang “Trouble in Mind Blues.” I opened my cape some more, the gun and holster slinging up-and-down my hip. With the wind gusting–my pants flaring out, I could smell Flukie’s Brut cologne and musty armpits, the sweat rolling down the side of his chest, darkening his shirt and wetting the inside of his pants. The showdown was the climax. Flukie felt his gun withdraw. He reached down and pushed it forward. Zu-Zu ducked down. I spat again, as if to dedicate this gunfight to her. Zu-Zu wanted nothing to do with it. She gave me the finger, then began to polish her nails. Sterling Silver cracked up, his gun shaking and vibrating. Flukie couldn’t take it. He drew his gun. I drew my gun and fired a shitload of mean bullets. I heard bullets cussing and fussing and discussing who to fuck up as they went everywhere. Niggahs started crying and dying and falling to the ground like shredded leaves. Zu-Zu crawled into the brush and fell out, the talisman barely able to hang on to her little neck. The trees leaned over to get out of the way of pissed-off bullets. Pandemonium erupted. Ashy niggahs and dusties ran everywhere, forgetting about looking dap. Hot shells played pepper with chicken legs. Sterling Silver’s gun licked his lips like Colonel Sanders taking part in Custard’s last stand. I saw wooden spears go flying by my big head, rapper Tony Scott and Zulu Nation trying to get people to stop the violence. While black people did their war dance, Flukie darted over to the brush, tore the talisman off Zu- Zu’s neck and dragged her pretty head away. I kept trading bullets with Sterling Silver like they were basketball cards. I stopped for a moment to ask him if he had any bubble gum. He hesitated. It was as if he was thinking I’ll-trade-you-Kareem- for-Magic. Kareem, of course, was a playground legend at nearby Power Memorial High when he was Lew Alcindor, but Magic would undoubtedly end up being a collector’s item; it seemed like niggahs had to have it in order to survive AIDS, gang-bangin’ and all that jazz. Zu-Zu screamed for help. She clung to a condom while Flukie shredded her blouse, Zu-Zu reaching back for anything she could grab and hold on to. She uprooted small trees and plants, creating a trail of leaves and murdered flowers. With his gun out of bullets, Flukie stared at Zu-Zu’s breasts like they were milk duds only good for suckers. He yawned when he realized that her nipples were no bigger than a penny. She stuck a root in his mouth. He chewed it until rootbeer dripped out. I aimed my gun at Flukie and tried to smoke him, but I ran out of bullets; they wanted no part of the blood and took off. Sterling Silver cracked up. He thought it was funny. He kissed my bullets goodbye as they crawled away. His dirty skin looked like an earthquake had hit it. He shot at my head. I kneeled down and begged for forgiveness.

“Pardon me,” I said. “My behavior was inexcusable. I was neglected as a child, so I never learned to respect others.”

Zu-Zu was still screaming.

“Take her away!” Sterling Silver shouted. Flukie smacked her, then dragged her off, Zu-Zu’s face bleeding lipstick.

“God,” I said. “You are the man. Help me.”

Sterling Silver squeezed harder on his gun. “You think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?” he asked. “What makes you think God is a he? He could be a she. After all, if God was a man, why would he let us fight and kill each other like this?”

“The Lawd works in strange ways,” I said.

“Fuck that,” said Sterling Silver. “We the ones smokin’ one another. It’s called survival. It’s a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.”

He walked up and pushed me in the chest.

“Don’t push me,” I said, “cause I’m close to the edge. I’m bout to [pause] lose my head.”

Sterling Silver pressed his gun against my big lips and fired.

YOU’RE NICKED

He cracked up. I looked at him, blood running down my chin tripping and shit.

“Jesus!” I said.

He stuck the gun inside my mouth and ordered me to suck on it.

“Jesus!” I shouted.

He kicked me in the crotch, put his finger on the trigger and mumbled “pop go da weasel.”

I heard one shot. I closed my eyes and thought “Adios, Amigo.” When I opened them, I saw Sterling Silver sprinting away, busting out. Even his gun was laughing, smoke coming out of his mouth.

I stayed on my knees until I finished my prayer. “Thank you, God,” I said. “But if you were really a woman, you would have taken that gun away from him.”

As I watched Sterling Silver take off, I thought about something Zu-Zu once said: “Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest and passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.”

I GO CRAZY

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Will Downing…”

I sat down at a table in the park and reminiscenced about the time me and Zu-Zu snuck through the back door of a jazz club, bogarted our way through a waiting line, sat down at a non- smoking table and had candlelight dinner with white wine. Zu-Zu had black velvet and said that she never felt so good.

When we left, Zu-Zu stole the China plate for a souvenir. I swiped two cloth napkins, a wine glass, the incense burner and a long black candle.

“Put the candle back,” Zu-Zu said when we got up from the table.

“What for?”

“I don’t like it.”

That was vintage Zu-Zu. She was forever sensitive. She dedicated her life to discussing problems of women, color and money. She was always tripping, always resisting, always crossing the boundaries. Chops once said that the only way he could ever get Zu-Zu was if he whittled her down.

BLUES INSIDE AND OUT

Zu-Zu was 100% woman.

I lowered my head so low while thinking about Zu-Zu that I hit it on the table and cut a small bit of skin off the braille on my forehead. I sung “Heart-Breaking Blues,” now that Zu-Zu was gone.

JUST ME & YOU

DJ Herc has got it going on. He started playing a ballad by Toni, Tony, Tone, and scratching it, both deferring presence and reinforcing it by repeating the same line.

JUST ME & YOU

Ooo-o, baby. It’s just us two. I don’t need nobody else, Zu-Zu.

JUST ME & YOU

“Where you taking me!” Zu-Zu screamed.

“Just keep on walkin’,” said Flukie.

“What we had was good,” Zu-Zu said. She was thinking of both the time when she was free and when she was with me.

JUST ME & YOU

Niggahs around me are talking about the rumor that Mister Magic might play for New York and Knickerbocker coach Pat Riley.

“Bring back the days of Grover Washington Jr.,” I tell them.

JUST ME & YOU

“There’s fifty bucks in it for you if you just cooperate,” Sterling Silver told Zu-Zu.

“Money can’t buy you love, can’t buy you happiness,” ZuZu replied. “The best things in life are free.”

JUST ME & YOU

“Don’t worry about a damn thing,” I said, believing that somehow Zu-Zu could hear me.

JUST ME & YOU

“Whatever you want,” Zu-Zu said. Flukie has got his gun inside her skirt.

“Shut up unless you want to get a shot in the ass.”

JUST ME & YOU

Chops came running up out of nowhere and said that it was up to us now to get Zu-Zu back. [Break]

“Another Marley remix!”

HOLD ON

“To your love,” I said. I dedicated my life and my next move to Zu-Zu. Then I grabbed Chops and moved the crowd, Chops shouting that we were Batman and Robin in Gotham City.

“Somebody phone commissioner Gordon’s office,” I heard some crank say.

IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM

I had to tell that buster off.

EASY DOES IT

Zu-Zu was getting a little annoyed with the way Flukie was handling her. She pulled away and showed him her tits and ass.

“Dickie’s dream,” she said.

“Lady be good,” said Sterling Silver.

“She ain’t nothing but ham n’ eggs,” said Flukie.

“I am what I am,” Zu-Zu said. She sounded like Gloria Gaynor singing “I will survive.”

They finally reached Monk at the Rumsey Playfield, and he checked her out closely.

“I want a little girl,” he said.

“Swell,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m about to be raped by Lester Young.”

He slapped her, and she spat in his face.

He pushed her down to the ground. “Since you like using yo’ mouth so much, why don’t you try this?”

He unzipped his pants and showed her his gun.

“You must be kidding,” Zu-Zu said. “I’m not your shoe shine boy.”

Monk did a moten swing but missed her. “You lucky,” he said. “Usually I never miss.”

Monk whistled through his fingers to summon his boys. Then he sat down and waited. He tried to make the mind and body one like Buddha.

FOUR AND MORE

Monk’s boys rushed in, carrying guns and poker cards, and sat down beside Zu-Zu. They roped her and gagged her mouth with a dirty bandanna.

“Suck me until I tell you to stop,” the bandanna told ZuZu. Zu-Zu sang a lonesome lullaby, hoping that Monk would go ahead and doze off since he was trying to reach the spirit world anyway.

Monk opened his eyes. “That’s not the kind of spirit world I’m trying to reach,” he said. He asked his boys if they hit the drugstore like he told them. They busted open three cases of Old Milwaukee and a carton of cigarettes. Monk grinned from ear-to- ear, then swung at the long ponytail of one of his boys.

“Boss, you missed,” said another one of his boys.

“So I did,” said Monk. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

Ben Hodges sneaked away, holding his big head, in order to get himself back together.

RUBBER NECK

As we run through the park, me and Chops feel our heads wobbling as if they were on necks made of latex.

“You think we’ll ever find her?” Chops asked.

“Be optimistic,” I said. I couldn’t help wondering where Chops had been all this time.

Chops couldn’t run for long. He stopped to listen to a fat lady singing. “It’s over,” Chops said. “We’re too late.”

“Shut up and run!” I shouted.

“I’m dead,” Chops said.

I snatched his big head and tossed it forward. “Run,” I said.

Chops sighed. “I’m tired of running,” he said. “You go ahead.”

I called him a “rudie.” Then I moved the crowd without him.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

Monk and the boys sat around and played poker like they were waiting for Loop Garoo Kid to ride out of the sunset from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. As legend tells it, the infamous Loop was a bullwhacker so arrogant and unfeeling that he would stamp “ship to Thailand” on the rears of virgin women, then demand their coin for postage.

Loop was an icon for Monk, but an anti-hero for Zu-Zu. “Why don’t you just get on with it?” she asked. They readied themselves like musicians in a jazz set, home on the range.

Monk poked out his lips to play alto sax. Flukie was on the serpent, his hands inside his pants. Sterling Silver on bass, booming in Zu-Zu’s face while talking yin-yang (Chinese principles of good and bad borrowed from Confucius). Ranchhand Arthur Walker on dumb-piano, standing silent behind the rest of the homeboys. Black cowboy Bill Pickett on guitar, plucking strands of Zu-Zu’s hair, his doggie Spradley eating dry Tang nearby. Cattle rustler Isom Dart did drums, musical glasses, nose-flute, Moog synthesizer, small-pipes, bazooka and glass harmonica. He tried repeatedly to go straight but was unable to give up his addiction to trying anything. Hodges got on the horn, talking fast between breaths and clutching his long rifle. Nat Love, better known as “Deadwood Dick,” liked virginals but agreed to take a mouth-organ.

Zu-Zu sat tied up like Mary Fields, a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary. She clenched her hands, making them shake like fists of fury.

The men all paused. They knew that they was looking good. They were holding on to their guns. Their hair was fierce. And, they saw themselves riding in Zu-Zu’s coach like it was a copus limousine.

Pickett restarted the action by snatching crumbs of caked-on makeup off Zu-Zu’s face.

“Leave it on!” Love demanded. “The more makeup and mascara, the merrier.”

Hodges called her “painted woman,” thinking he was clever. It wasn’t clever or even ornery, but the name stuck.

Zu-Zu spat in their faces. Monk walked over and swung at her.

“Boss, you missed,” said Dart.

“So I did,” Monk said. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

Love’s lips were bleeding. He dashed for a washcloth, blood falling to the ground.

“You popped him good, boss,” said Walker.

Monk threw a can of beer and spat in Zu-Zu’s face. “He’ll be back.”

The men all paused like they didn’t know if he would come back. Meantime, Monk realized that Zu-Zu had managed to spit and talk and sing with her big mouth gagged. He was pissed.

“Who put that weak bandanna over her mouth?” Monk asked. He untied the knot and threw the thing away.

“Give it back to me!” Zu-Zu shouted. “It’s dirty, but it’s good.”

The bandana cried tears of joy. “Look at me,” it said. “Did you see the way she sucked me? I’m all wet, and she wants me back. I don’t know what to say. I guess I’m all choked up.”

“You’ll be choked, period, if you don’t shut yo’ mouth,” Flukie said. He was always the violent one.

“Say you love me,” said Zu-Zu. She cut loose from the ropes and retrieved the bandanna.

“Silence, painted woman!” said Monk. He walked over and rubbed the bandanna against her face. “If you want the bandanna, you can have it. Wipe the makeup off your face before I steal your riches.”

“No!” Love screamed, running back to the gang. “Why give her the opportunity to be herself, a woman. Let her stay an artificial nigger. Love her the way she is, or leave her and let another man dominate her.”

Monk stretched his face and thought of “Teacher” back in Shaolin:

“Why the tonsure?” Monk asked.

His teacher tossed a porcelain saucer, making it skip along the surface of the drinking water in the well. “They want you to be like Mike,” he grudgingly said. “It is not my will, but rather the will of the school.” Teacher flung another plate, once again making it skip along the water before breaking on the ground.

“Why must I emulate Michael Jordan?” Monk asked.

“You cannot leave the 35th chamber until you do,” Teacher said. He threw a sword, making it skip along the water.

“But Teacher…”

“The goal of the 35th chamber is submission!” shouted Teacher. “If you cannot submit, then you must go!”

Monk kneeled by Teacher’s sandals. “Yes, Teacher. I beg forgiveness. I kissed the very ground you walk on. I shall do what the school asks of me.”

“Um.” Teacher hurled a little Japanese girl and made her skip along the water.

Monk opened his eyes and stood up. “That’s live!” Monk said. “How did you do that, homie?”

“This ain’t Kung Fu,” Teacher said. “Quit asking so many questions.”

Monk grabbed a piece of porcelain and glass, waving the sharp edges at Teacher’s throat. “Tell me, or I’m going to tell the school how many dishes you’ve broken.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Teacher. “But after I tell you, I never want to see yo’ face again.”

Monk sat back down while Teacher meditated and spat out the secret. “Speed, plus pressure, allows the object to skip, that is, pass over the waters.”

Monk rose and kicked Teacher in the shin. “Thanks,” said Monk. “I promise not to tell the school that you’re the nigger busboy they’ve been looking for.”

“Hey man, where you going?” Teacher asked.

“To Harlem!” Monk shouted.

“Haarlem in the Netherlands?” Teacher asked.

“In America!” Monk shouted. “I’m catching a ride with that honky Christopher Columbus!” Monk sprinted away to be a part of New York immigration.

SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME

Walker wanted nothing to do with what he thought was going to be a cosmetic make-over.

“Follow the travelin’ light to Forty Second Street,” Monk said. When Walker turned away, Monk swung at him.

“Boss, you missed,” said Love.

“So I did,” said Monk. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

Dart was holding his crotch in pain. “What you hit me for?” he asked.

“I never liked you anyway,” Monk said. “You remind me of a busboy I once knew. Now shut up and tie her up real good. Speed, plus pressure, will only make matters worse. She’s deliberately trying to skip the torment. She’s spitting in our faces in hopes of making us mad so that she can’t be broken.”

The homeboys all looked at each other. “Did you give him the right pack of cigarettes?” Love asked Pickett.

“I gave him Kool,” Pickett said.

“Then why is he tripping like this?” Dart asked.

“What is this?” Monk asked. “A meeting in the ladies room? Hurry up and rope her before she gets loose! Brand her “government inspected,” then let’s move the crowd and herd some more young black girls before the other gangs corner the market!”

Sterling Silver ordered Flukie not to budge. “Our money first!” Sterling Silver insisted.

“I don’t owe you nothing!” said Monk. “Get going before you get hurt!”

“I’m going home to momma,” said Flukie. He took off.

“Look at that spook go!” The boys all laughed heartily, Monk busted up.

“We’ll be back,” Sterling Silver promised. He turned and chased after Flukie, Spradley barking at him.

“Let’s get out of here before those lugheads come back,” Monk said. “Hide the girl by the telephone pole and tall trees lined up over there. She should feel at home with all those dicks standing in line.”

Monk liked hangin’ with the homeboys because they always laughed at his jokes.

FEE FI FO FUM

Monk enjoyed being a giant. He strutted towards nirvana.

GIANT STEPS

Making impressions. Monk improvised his ascension. He was live at the village vanguard. He was Soultrane. Meditations. Africa/Brass. “One of my favorite things,” said Love “Supreme.”

Monk climbed a steep hill, yelling for the new DJ, Shep Pettibone, to remix his life. Pettibone started scratching Blue Magic and B B & Q’s “(I’m a) Dreamer” into Smoke City’s “Dreams” and “(We’re Living) In The World of Fantasy.” That’s how bad he was. The niggah could cut-up. He was better than Clivilles and Cole put together. He could jam on vinyl like Michael Jackson. He could take four Gemini 1200 turntables and mix them all at once, without using scratch or brake pads. As Angela Bofill would say, the boy was “too tough.” Shep was the only DJ that Monk ever liked.

“Let’s go,” Monk said. He wanted to see his boy spin. Off in the distant horizon, Pettibone broke out with a megamix.

“This stuff is really fresh…”

SINGLE LIFE

“I’m living the single, single, single–life!” I kept running, despite the fact that I was all by myself, in search of Zu-Zu. I could hear the DJ flipping the tracks like it was nothing.

JUST A TOUCH OF LOVE

“All I want to do before we leave is feel her breasts, see if she’s a milk-giver,” said Nat Love.

ALL AROUND THE WORLD

“I can’t find my baby.” I was frustrated.

NO ONE’S GONNA LOVE YOU

Zu-Zu spat in Love’s face.

“When did you first spit on a niggah?” Pickett asked. “Do you remember the time?”

“Send me forget-me-nots,” said Zu-Zu, “to help me to remember.”

PUMP IT

A brother cheered as I raced past him.

U CAN’T TOUCH THIS

Zu-Zu spat in Pickett’s face. “To Sir with Love,” she said.

CONTROL

“I need her alive,” said Monk.

CAN’T STOP

I told an old man, “I’m looking at you, you’re looking at me.”

The old man chuckled. “I’m walking down the street watching ladies go by, watching you.”

September 25, 2013
The Titles Sequence From the Adventures Of Lucky Pierre

Robert Coover

Department of English
Brown University

(Cantus.) In the darkness, softly. A whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city.

And now, the flickering of a light, a pallor emerging from the darkness as though lit by a candle, a candle guttering in the cold wind, a forgotten candle, hid and found again, casting its doubtful luster on this faint white plane, now visible, now lost again in the tenebrous absences behind the eye.

And still the hushing plaint, undeterred by light, plying its fricatives like a persistent woeful wind, the echo of woe, affanato, piangevole, a piangevole wind rising in the fluttering night through its perfect primes, lamenting the beautiful princess become an unclean widow, an emergence from C, a titular C, tentative and parenthetical, the widow then, weeping sore in the night, the candle searching the pale expanse for form, for the suggestion of form, a balm for the anxious eye, weeping she weepeth.

The glimmering light, the light of the world, now firmer at the center, flickers unsteadily at the outer edges, implications of tangible paraboloids amid the soft anguish, the plainsong exploring its mode, third position athwart, for among all her lovers there are none to comfort her, and the eye finding a horizon, discovering at last a distant geography of synclinal nodes, barren, windblown, now blurring, now defined.

Now defined: a strange valley, brighter at its median and upon the crests than down the slopes, the hint there perhaps of vegetation, like a grove of pines buried in the snow, and still the chant, epicedial, sospirante, she is driven like a hunted animal, C to C and F again, she findeth no rest. How many have died here?

The plainchant, blowing through the gloomy valley like an afflicted widow, continues to mourn the solitary city. Overtaken amidst the narrow defiles. Continues to grieve, ignoring the gradual illuminations, a grief caught in secret acrostics, gone into captivity. All her gates are desolate. The eye courses the valley to its yawning embouchure, past a scattering of obscure excrescences with bright tips, courses the dark defile to its radical, this pinched and woebegone pit, mourning its uprooted yew, her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted. Gravis. Innig. In bitterness, yes con amarezza, she is with bitterness.

Beyond this gnurled foramen, crumpled crater too afflicted to expose its core to chant or candle, lies a quieter brighter field, yet one ringed about with indices of a multitude of transgressions, tight with uncertainty and attenuation, and, as it were, mere propylaeum to the ruptured conventicle of extravagance and savagery just beyond, just below…

Ah! what a sight, this wild terrain cleft violently end to end and exposed like an open grave! The light flares and wanes, flutters, as though caught in a sudden gale, as though eclipsed by a flight of harts. O woe, her princes are denied a pasture, nature is convulsed, and a terrible commotion, sundered by plosives, sounds all about. Angoscioso and disperato, rising and falling intervals in the tremulous matinal gloom.

Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed: letters. Flickering neumes. VAGINAL ORIFICE. LABIA MAJORA. And not a propylaeum: a PERINEUM. ANUS. Alas, despised because they have seen her nakedness. C to C and F again. Like the echo of letters, the shadow of codes, the breath of labia, yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward, a simple canticle, notations writ on the ass end of a kneeling woman, this kneeling woman, this ass end: URETHRA, CLITORIS, black indications quavering in this ghostly light, the light of the world, the light of a solitary city at the end of night, the coldest hour. Crying: her filthiness is in her skirts.

Between the spreading intrados of the massive thighs, below the keystone cunt, all barbed and petaled, through a filigree of letters suspended mysteriously in the archway–FLESHY PILLOW, now sharp, now diffuse–beyond and through all this, we see the distant teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. They sway in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the wintry dawn, blowing out of the ANUS and the VAGINAL CANAL, it is snowing on the city.

O Lord, behold my affliction! A vast desolation, the city, the afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified himself. Yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped, rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below, chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding snow.

Through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads, between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose: forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his risks–or rather, perhaps that is a pedestrian- crossing sign, blurred by the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and narrow, at right angles. There he is, huddled miserably against the snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well, brushing through the cold and restless crowds, as horns sound and airbrakes wheeze, sirens wail, all her people sigh, they seek bread, the last whimpering echo of a plainsong guttering like a candle in the morning traffic.

His hat jammed down upon his ears and scowling brows, his overcoat lapels turned up to the hatbrim, scarf around his chin, he is all but buried in his winter habit. Only his eyes stare forth, aglitter with vexation and the resolution to press on, and below them, his nose, pinched and flared with indignation, his pink cheeks puffed out, blowing frosty clouds of breath through chattering teeth. His mouth, under his moustache, is drawn into a rigid pucker around his two front teeth, my god, it is cold, what am I doing out here? His hands are stuffed deep in his overcoat pockets, and poking forth from his thick herringbone wraps like a testy one-eyed malcontent: his penis, ramrod stiff in the morning wind, glistening with ice crystals, livid at the tip, batting aggressively against the sullen crowds, this swirling mass of dark bodies too cold for identities, struggling through the snow, their senses harrowed, intent solely on keeping their brains from freezing.

Oh, my poor doomed ass, I’m in real trouble, he whimpers to himself as he trundles along, tears running down his cheeks, teeth clattering, frozen snot in his moustache, up against it, expletives the only thing that can keep him warm, that he can pretend will keep him warm, shouldering his way through a thickening stupefaction, sidestepping the suicides, those are the lucky ones, man, not you, who gives a shit, all running down anyway, why do you have to play the fucking hero?

He walks through winter like that, wheezing and whistling, feeling sorry for himself, aching with cold, sick of keeping it up anymore, but scared to die, picking them up, putting them down, hup two three, attaboy, yes, there he goes, a living legend, who knows, maybe the last of his kind, seen through a whirl of blowing snow, through a scrim of messages, an unfocused word-filter, lamenting the world’s glacial entropy and the snow down his neck, bobbing along in this cold sea of pathetic mourners, this isocephalic compaction of misery and affliction, the dying city and he in it, whimpering: piss on it! yet refusing to quit, refusing to tip over and get trampled into the slush, and so celebrating consciousness after all, in his own wretched way, the man of the hour, the one and only: Lucky Pierre.

The swish and blast of the passing traffic modulate into a kind of measureless rhythm, not a pulsation so much as an aimless rising and falling, sometimes blunted, sometimes drawn brassily forth. Subways rumble underfoot, airdrills rattle in alleys, and there’s the thunder of jets overhead like occasional celestial farts. Tipped wastebaskets spill bottles, newspapers, pamphlets, dead fetuses, old shoes. Cars, spinning gracefully in the icy streets, smash decorously into each other, effecting dampened cymbals, sending heads and carcasses flying through their shattering windshields and crumpling into snowbanks. Above the crowds, a billboard asks: WHAT IS MY PRICK DOING IN YOUR CUNT, LIZZIE? Six blocks away and around the corner, a theater marquee replies: FUCKING ME! FUCKING ME! O SO NICELY! Smoke rises from a bombed-out building, and a crowd has gathered, warming themselves by the ruins. Distant crackle: trouble in the city. Somewhere.

A little old lady, leaning on a cane, hesitates at a curb, peers up at the light, now changing from green to red. Her spectacles are frosted over, icycles hang from her nose, her free hand trembles at her breast, clutching an old frayed shawl. The man, trying to catch the light, comes charging up, but not in time, skids to a stop, glissandos right into the old lady’s humped-over backside, bowling her head over heels into the street with a jab of his stiff penis. There is a brief plaint like the squawk of a turkey as a refuse truck runs her down. Old as she was, it’s still all a little visceral, but soon enough the traffic rolling by has flattened her out, her vitals blending into the dirty slush, her old rags soaking up the rest.

–Pity, someone mutters.

–Life’s tough.

–Where’s the street department? Goddamn it, they’re never around when you need them.

The light changes, the old lady is trampled away. There’s the blur of hurrying feet, kicking, splattering, through the blood, slush, and snow. Thousands of feet. Going all directions. Whush, crump, crump, stomp. Crushing butts, condoms, fishheads, gumwrappers. Someone’s pocketwatch. Beer cans. Crump, crump, crump, a kind of rasper continuo. Windup toys and belt buckles. Bicycle sprocket. Ticket stubs. All those frozen feet, shuffling along, whush, whush, almost whispering: That’s right, Maggie, lift your arse and whush, crump, crump, tickle my balls! Oh christ, it’s cold! It’s too fucking cold!

Listen, get your mind off it. Think of something else. E.g. comma green places. Where it’s warm exclamation mark. That’s it. Chasing about in a meadow at the edge of a forest, how about that? Come on, give it a try, make it yet, hup two three, she runs behind a tree, peeks out, showing her ass. He bounds over fallen trunks, crackling branches and dry leaves. Splashing through a brook. Up mossy rocks. Delicious stink. Yeah, good, moving along now, keep it up colon. Cavorting in soft grass. Some kind of music…

(Front end of a heavy bus, barreling through the city street, spitting up snow, whipping it into black slush: BLAAAAT!)

Cantilena maybe, piped on a syrinx, that’s good, Cissy’d like that, all’ antico, right. Her handsome ass aglow in the sun. He licks it, tongues her cunt. Yum. She kicks him, springs away. They circle each other. Hah! She scampers off, he chases, catches her, they roll about, flutes fading, rest. Mmm. Silent now in the sunny green meadow, a sweet heady peace, street sounds diminishing to nothing more than a playful wind in the fading forest. Yes, good. He pokes his nose in her cunt again, nuzzles dreamily about.

(Sudden roar of the bus, splattering through snow, blackened with soot, its windows greasy, foglights glowing dully. City streets, buildings, people, traffic, go whipping by.)

Sshh! Getting there! Twelve girls now, a pretty anthology, in the sunny meadow, yes, twelve of them, standing on their heads, back to back, butt to butt, legs spread like the petals of a flower. He hovers, admiring the corolla, many-stemmed, each with its own style and stigma, the variegated pappi blowing in the soft summer breeze; then he drops down to nibble playfully at the keels, suck at the stamens, slip in and out of septa. Distantly: the sound of muted trumpets–

BllaaaAAAAAAATTT! He jumps back to the curb, but too late, a bus bearing dawn on him–THWOCK!–whacks his prick as it goes roaring by: he screams with pain, spins with the impact, and is bowled into the crowd, now crossing with the light, spilling a dozen of them. He catches a glimpse of the bus gunning it on down the street, an advertisement spread across its rear: I CAN SEE HER CUNT, GUSSY! and what looks like the eye of a pig in the back window, staring at him. The crowds, rushing and tumbling over him, curse and weep:

–What is it like, Nelly?

He hobbles to the edge of the flow, nursing his bruised cock, looking for a reason to go on, looking for something to wrap it in. He finds a bum sleeping under a newspaper and appropriates page one. Over a photo of the Mayor at a public execution of three small children, believed to be the offspring of urban guerrillas, is the headline: A LARGE HAIRY MOUTH SUCKING HIS PURPLE PRICK.

Aw hey listen: fuck it. Quit. Yeah.

He sits on the curb, snuffling, huddled miserably over his battered rod, trying to coax green dreams out of his iced-up lobes, feeling the snow creep up his ass, no sorrow like my sorrow: bitter snatch of the diatonic aubade. Something seems to leave him, some spring released, a slipping away…

No! he cries in sudden panic, leaping up. Forget that shit, fade it out, no more messages, pick ’em up and put ’em down, hup two three four, he’s running along now, prick waggling frantically, stiffarming the opposition, recocking the spring, leaping the lifeless, close now, yeah, central heating, all that, gonna make it–oof! sorry, ma’am!

–Good morning, L.P.!

–Good morning, love! (Whew!) After you!

–Thank you, Mr. Peters!

–Morning, sir! Thank you, sir!

Ah, damn it, is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

o o o o o

September 25, 2013
Obsession

Kathy Acker

My Father

Kathy says, For finally my father was coming back. As soon as the night turned black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.

Once he had settled down inside, with his pint and slippers, the cat nodding drowsily against his shoulder, he told me that he hadn’t brought back what he had promised me, my own whip. Instead he had come back with a non-white brat, outcast, orphan.

This devil’s child who was nameless was a pale, skinny male. His hairs were blacker than a witch’s vagina. When I smelled him, there was a reek of sheepdog who had never been taught anything.

I spent the night, sleepless, weeping into my pillow, and so did he.

I wasn’t a good child. Or, the same thing, they (the males in my family) told me that I wasn’t a good child. I didn’t know how to react to this identity, this reification, other than by throwing my badness, which my shyness always wants to keep hidden, into their faces.

But openly I loved the night. Whenever it was black, outside, I talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew they had languages and I began to learn their languages.

Then father tried to make the gipsy brat into something less than outcast by giving him the name of a child who had already died. Day after day I watched the brat. Unlike me he wasn’t bad because he was being told that he was bad; nameless, from as deep as his self or sea went, all he wanted to do was to spit at the world. The human world that seemed nonhuman. I admired his ability; it didn’t matter to him, as nothing mattered to him, that I did.

Even though he was only six years old, he would have stolen everything from this father’s house, but there was nowhere to go with it.

Though I never spoke to him openly, I would have done the same thing.

My father loved his false son. Hindley, my father’s real son, hated the new Heathcliff.

My father knew that I saw that all that I couldn’t and wanted to do, Heathcliff did. “Why can’t you be a good child, Kathy?”

“Why can’t you be a good father, father?”

Outside The Family

Soon after these questions had taken place, Kathy’s father died. He would never return.

Both Heathcliff and Kathy grieved. Hindley didn’t give a shit because his father had hated him.

Heathcliff and Kathy sobbed out each other’s eyes, then ate each other’s tongues.

Hindley (Hideous) inHeirited the House so Kathy and Heathcliff moved out into tracks beyond and for them the human world went away. Their only adulthood, before begun, was gone. The world gone, there was only nature.

The days of grief, the days without shelter, announce to all old maids and to all those who are maimed and who maim that the actual churches are open.

Remained outside. Remained outside the family. How Hindley became the father, for the true father is nowadays President Bush, so all the rest are orphans.

This was how Kathy began to want all that lay outside: nature and, most violent of all, the sun. Crags who wait under the sun.

Kathy announced, “I will not come.” Heathcliff never announced anything. Heathcliff was naturally unapproachable.

In The Beginning, Heathcliff Didn’t Matter To Me

Kathy says,

“One day I will never come back and on that day I will keep coming back and coming back.”

My nurse’s name was Ellen.

“Hurry, Ellen, hurry. “I know exactly where I want to go. I want to go to where a colony of moorgame are settled; blue and purple feathers more aflame with green than any sun; I want to see whether they have made their nests yet; I want to see.”

The sun.

My nurse replied that the birds didn’t breed on this side of Penniston Crags.

“Oh yes, they do. I’ve been there.”

“You’re too young to travel.”

“Only a little farther, I’ve got to go a little further than I’ve ever been, climb to a certain hillock that I’ll know, pass by a bank that I’ve smelled, leaves of certain rust and one pile of shit, I know there are tracks, and by the time I get to the other side without noticing it, I will have met the birds.” Going to the other side and not dying. Whether or not I died.

My nurse didn’t bother getting angry with me because she knew I was wild. Not wild enough. She just sighed as if she was swallowing her breath and whispered the only whisper of a socially good woman: “It’s a pity that you’re never going to be content.”

I didn’t hear anything. Not Heathcliff.

The next morning the first thing I heard was the outside. I woke up to the shrieking rain. The winds begin to tear. Juice ran down the insides of my legs. Don’t forget? How can I ever, even when dead? For I’m always holding an orphan’s hand.

I’m Perverse

In order to complete his bushy family, Hideous found himself (somewhere) a child bride so that there would be a mommy and a daddy. Substitute mommy and daddy more than equal mommy and daddy.

The child bride, like most humans, was a substitute, too, because, being frail and weak and a good wife, she actively detested Heathcliff even more than her husband (did) and threw him out of the house every time Heathcliff returned to snatch some food.

At this moment, Kathy began to act as her parents wanted her to. Precisely: instead of being with Heathcliff, she stayed home. Then blamed her parents for making her and Heathcliff separate.

Was she, like me, scared of men?

So now she had reason to detest Hideous. Cliche: “Dear Heathcliff,” she wrote, “I’m acting in such a way that the only relation we can have is that you’ll reject me. Once you’ve fully rejected me, I’ll be able to begin to love you.”

By refusing to run away with Heathcliff, Kathy began to gain all for which she longed: to perversely enter into being with Heathcliff.

Or: now that innocence was dead, she and Heathcliff again began to be the same through books. Living with her parents, Kathy was forced to go to school. Heathcliff was going nowhere outside. Kathy taught Heathcliff how to read; this teaching (creating hierarchy) poisoned her love, for identity is shit in the midst of childhood.

The kingdom of childhood is the kingdom of lust. Books, by replicating this or any phenomenon, cause perversity.

I’m not trying to destroy B, but to destroy how I continuously think about B, think about how our bodies burn together, by repeating these thoughts perversely.

The Unspeakable

Kathy says:

Where the sun and the black sky are.

They now consider Heathcliff less than a person. “Heath,” my new mother said, “if you must use the servants’ bathroom, do not do so during working hours.” But being nonhuman Heathcliff doesn’t need a bathroom.

I don’t care about Heathcliff. Who will I pick to be? A person whose canopy is that velvet in which the stars lie. My family can kick the dogs like Heathcliff out of the house every day of the week.

I can’t bear being without Heathcliff. Today Heathcliff and I ran into the fields which are wild. We’re never going to come back. I don’t want my brain to hurt and, when my hand is stuck up my cunt, my fingers are all full of juices. I want to be in the wild forever and I want to be Heathcliff and I don’t care about anything else. See. I’m breaking free.

When I’ve broken free, there’ll be no more such thing as loneliness which torments me all the time. Alone, without loneliness: all there are around me are leaves and branches and winds and fly through my hairs and everything living and moving each other and each vision, thing seen, is another living thing and I’m never going back to being lonely where I now am

I know what the society (my family) (here) is to which I’m never going to return. The inside of the family is a maze whose entrances and exits are lost to those caught in its entrails. The family is foul; garbage lies in its streets. Street sign, NO HUMANS EXIST HERE.

I can’t be other than Heathcliff because to be other than Heathcliff is to be human. Example: Hindley who is only himself beats up his servants or dogs who are all the same to him. His– this society is foul because it’s based on hypocrisy: it doesn’t recognize violence or death. Hindley tells me that he loves me and so, places me in his labyrinth. Hindley owns the house or labyrinths in which he’s also inside; every street or portion of this maze is foul, not by hypocrisy, but by possession.

I must die for Heathcliff so that I’m no longer a human. Only an outcast. Today the witch went to see the sea because she had to hear someone else’s voice. There was a dead person. The only way to raise the person from death is via the cunt. As it crashed waves against the rocks, the ocean began tossing up tiny fish and the swept, repeatedly, into the witch’s crotch. The sun fell down into the water. And I have made my allegiances, although all allegiances are hell. I saw two seals. The only way is to annihilate all that’s been written. That can be done only through writing. Such destruction leaves all that is essential intact; resembling the processes of time, such destruction allows only the traces of death to subsist.

I’m a dead person. Heathcliff says, “Down, dog, down.”

Story: The Beginning of the World

When the servant who was a FUNDAMENTALIST complained to his master that he and his wife never went to church to eat Jesus’ flesh, his master punished him by making his, the master’s, daughter go to bed without supper.

Immediately Kathy rebelled by running away with Heathcliff, again, up into the moors. This time they stayed in the beginning of the world.

Time began here, outside, where there were no humans. They wandered on the moors for days. They’re only safe where everything’s public.

On the other side of the moors, they found a house similar to theirs. Because Kathy’s nature was perverse or fucked-up, she wanted to be wild and to be part of society. In this total freedom, she said to her friend, “Let’s find out what the inside of this house looks like.”

They climbed down the crags, then peered into two of the windows. They gazed upon a rich boy and a girl, who were their age, dismembering a puppy.

Heathcliff said, “They aren’t nice people, those who live inside of houses.”

Kathy wanted to destroy the beginning of this sight or world. Heathcliff would do whatever Kathy wanted. Listen. “The name of that which is forbidden is Heaven,” Kathy said. “Do it to me now.”

Heathcliff said he would do whatever Kathy wanted.

“Listen. I, Kathy, am dreaming that sex which is the witch’s den. The den is located in the true house.”

Rattles, colored wheels, amniotic rags, and an excessive number of teeth were stigmatizing all outcasts.

“I knew that there was a place where everything would take place. I started searching for that place.

“I was inside a house. Leaving some room, I began looking for tracks, a smell, these are the indications of the way to get to the room I want to reach. I dream, and have always dreamt, of water.

“The armier Arnaud Gelis has said, for we do not need authorities but we do need information, that the dead, with whom he had the unfortunate habit of consorting, wanted all the men and women who were living to, also, be dead. Whether or not you admire this sort of thing. Doves, owls, weasels, snakes, lizards, hares, and all other animals who suck on the milk of cows, goats, women are the associates of witches. Behind milk lies blood; so, behind every each witch, all the dead.

“Between two rooms, one is always walking to another room. I passed through a series of rooms.

“Finally I came to thin metal stairs which descended downwards.

“According to our Inquisitors who are only able to see the material world, the claviceps purpurea, a mushroom which grows out of rye, causes ergotism whose symptoms are cramp-like convulsions, epilepsy, and a loss of consciousness; ergot causes abortion and is anti-hemorrhagic. During such losses of human consciousness, visions can appear.

“I stood on the edge of the black metal stairs’ first step.

“A mushroom that grows near fir trees and birches, amanita muscaria, causes both ecstasy and lameness.

“I was standing in the middle of the fight of stairs.

“In China, the name for amanita muscaria is toad mushroom. Both toads and witches are crippled. In the fourteenth century, Billia la Castagna kept a large toad under her bed whom she nurtured on bread, cheese, and meat so that she could make a potion out of its shit.

“I walked down metal staircase after metal staircase, descending. After long descents, I saw a floor that was stacks of wood shelves, even cabinets, all filled with books, between some of the shelves openings just large enough for a human to fit into, all around the spiralling stairs.

“Finally I descended to a huge room where there was red somewhere. This room, which was where I had wanted to reach, was the library of the witch. I felt scared. I was at the bottom.”

As they were looking into the house and making fun of the rich children, Heathcliff realized that it was time to leave. Starting to run, he pulled Kathy’s hand in such a way that she tripped.

A dog sat on and ripped her ankle while his purple, huge tongue half-fell out of his lips and these pendant dripped with bloody slaver.

Since Kathy was missing, Heathcliff told Kathy’s family about what had just taken place.

Heathcliff’s Story of the Rich House

The children are in their house, doing their homework. These children consist of a young boy and a young girl.

The young girl was assigned a paper on Edgar Allan Poe. But she doesn’t have enough time to complete her assignment.

In the classroom, the teacher talks. Teach is paying attention to many, almost all the other students and the girl can’t manage to interrupt to say that she didn’t have time to do her paper. She runs out of the school.

Being a good girl, she goes home, back to her room, and works on the Poe paper incessantly, cutting and cutting until only two sections are left. Each of these sections is a few paragraphs long.

Despite all these odds–as if Fate is sitting in judgment against her–the girl goes back to her school so she can present her Poe thesis. Now the institution is shut.

Seeing that she was thrust out of school against her will and desire, it is probable that the devil rules this world.

The girl continued down the street, into the building next to the school. There she saw the spirit of Karen Finley. Seeing this spirit allowed her to take off all her clothes which were now heavy, drenched in mud, icy from the outside mist.

The slut walked bare-ass through what was simultaneously a pub and a church.

Saw that none of the building’s inhabitants, all of whom were male, gave a shit that she was naked. One of them even walked up to her and was very nice to her.

Later on in the pub, she decided to hide behind the entrance door so that she could slip a pair of shorts over her ass. But she couldn’t find any.

“Shit. I didn’t bring any shorts.”

She had to put back on all her clothes which were still wet cold and dirty.

One of these men, all of whom were older than her, comments, “Nothing has changed. Nothing changes.”

Me

Heathcliff says, Because I had told them about Kathy caught in the strange house, Hindley kicked me out for good. So I threw away the rest of my human trappings and I became an animal who didn’t even clean itself. In order to toss their humanity into their faces.

Humans run away from their own shit, their ends, whereas I was now covered in mine: I had become twice a man.

When Kathy returned from strangeness, I loved her more than ever. She had came back dressed like a lady, no longer like a wild thing. I didn’t see her when she came in. She was silent about what had taken place in that strangeness. She told her father that she wanted to see me immediately.

But I was shit.

As soon as Kathy saw me, her heart leaped up like the dog it is. Even though romanticism pretends otherwise.

As if one can own shit, Hindley owned me so he knew where I was and ordered me to enter the house and greet Kathy as a servant along with all the other servants. I am not.

I did as I had been told only in order to throw more shit into their faces. But, as soon as she saw me, Kathy threw her finery into a bathroom and climbed on me until her lips became my skin. Because it was thirsty, her pussy rubbed me. I knew that I will always hold her cunt in the palm of my hand.

Then she leaped back and informed me, I was only her servant and, worse, I smell of piss. “Oh, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me?”

Since I was her servant, I couldn’t speak.

Father said, “Since you’re a servant, Heathcliff, you can shake hands with Kathy. Only once.”

I mumbled that I wouldn’t do anything. The lips of hell were opening and closing.

“You shouldn’t be sulky because you smell of piss.”

I was silent because I was a hound.

“Heathcliff. Now shake hands with me.”

SOCIETY’S PROGRESS TO TOTALITARIANISM AROSE AND KEEPS ARISING FROM ITS REFUSAL TO BE SHIT. I touched her.

“Oh, Heathcliff, you are filthy dirty.” Kathy was becoming obsessed. Obsessed because she simultaneously wanted to touch me and didn’t. I knew every inch of her flesh, muscle, and liquids, and I was hungry for her. “I didn’t ask you to touch me.”

Let the heavens open up, rain sperm.

Kathy said, “But I want to touch you.” I knew, just as she knew, that she would be unable to dream until the moment she dreamed about me.

I knew that she knew that I knew this, so I decided, in order to teach her, that I would become dirtier and dirtier until I was so dirty that I would have nothing more to do with what her family named reality and I would drag her down with me.

This is the way that Kathy says that obsession never rises from and involves only one person: “Let all that matters be sex when and where all is glowing.”

I say: I don’t need sex. I don’t need a cock, my cock. Simply: I am not going to and I am not living in hell.

As soon as I had announced my allegiance to filth to Kathy’s family, I got out of their house. I ran away to the crags and moors and rocks who belong to anybody.

Where it will always be raining, for the eyes will no longer

For I, body, know who I am.

I will not deny the witches.

If Kathy was pure of cunt, she would follow the sperm out of the cockless cock.

She stayed behind because she preferred to make her allegiance to skin, her fancy clothes, trappings of society, rather than to me, the gook inside the body. Because she was scared to shake hands with filth.

Kathy In Her Society Finery,

“But if I knew what men were really like, I would never want one. I say this so that I can be more desirable to men.”

Me–Perverted

Heathcliff says, But I cried all night because she was mine and she was hurting me. I cried, but I wasn’t ever going to be demeaned. Naturally I wanted my skin to be other than dark and my hair to be straight, not so that I could live in a house, but so that she could look up to me enough to run away with me.

And then I’d sink my head into her stomach and my teeth would turn into her bones. I will not live without her–whatever I must do! I have sold myself to the devil! As do those who write.

The next day I woke up and then I heard a noise. When I peered through one of their infernal windows, I saw those two rich murderers or children walking into the black-and-white tiled hallway. Of course, I followed them inside.

As soon as he had passed the ceiling beams, the boy turned around and said to me that I should brush that horse’s mane out of my face. I bucked, in the kitchen picked up a large pot of simmering soup, ran back to the edge of the hallway and threw the liquid into his visage.

I had seen Kathy standing in the hall and, then, the look on her face.

Here was the first time that I wanted to kill her. That night I dreamed that she died from giving birth to a baby. This was the first time I dreamed this.

According to Gilbert Lely reciting some kind of Freudianism, one of the ways a sadist can prevent himself or herself from travelling from neurosis to psychosis is to sublimate his or her asocial instincts into art.

Freud.

After I had put the boiling liquid to the boy’s face, Kathy loved me even more than before. I needed to believe that she loved me so that I could be alive.

I kept turning nasty because there was nothing else I could do in the face of rejection. In the face of Hindley. The nastier I found myself, the more Kathy looked up to my purity.

As Joseph who was religious said, “This house is an infernal region.”

Today, a yellow worm that looked like a plastic banana began a walk across a dirt path. The path moved downhill in steeper and steeper zigzags until it reached a sign that said BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES.

Kathy hadn’t run away with me to this earth of rattlesnakes where there were no more humans. Both Kathy and I knew that I was the only one who could lead her here, where nature would tame her by demeaning her so that she could begin to learn.

Marriage According to Heathcliff:

As soon as her father went travelling, I returned to Kathy.

The first time I stood again in that sittingroom, she was mentioning to the nurse who happened to look like Jessie Helms that the rich boy had asked her to marry him.

I said, loudly, “Kathy, with all that I am and have–if that is any power–I beg you to stop rejecting me for your rich friends. I have born too much rejection since I was born.”

Kathy didn’t notice me because she was combing her pussy hairs.

“I’ve come back to you, Kathy. Why aren’t you looking at me?”

“Because you don’t belong in any decent society. You smell like a horse, like Linton said you smelled, and you don’t know what a relationship is. Human. Your very presence bores me.”

I didn’t know how to reply because I was open to her.

“You’re as dumb as any animal, Heathcliff.”

Because she needed me to be her and at the same time refused to touch my skin, I no longer was.

“But the fact that I’m marrying Linton has nothing to do with you. I’m not marrying Linton because you don’t exist; what you believe is my torment of you doesn’t exist.

“I’ll explain to you why I’m marrying Linton:

Marriage:

Kathy says, I said to my nurse, but not to Heathcliff: “Do you know the real reason why I’m marrying that creep who doesn’t possess a cock? (Not that I give a damn about cocks: it’s what they stand for.)

“I can’t marry Heathcliff because Heathcliff and I aren’t separate from each other. It would be redundant for me to marry Heath.

“I need to get married. Heathcliff and I don’t belong in the normal world whose name is society–we don’t even know whether we’re male or female. And. But, unlike Heathcliff, I can pass for normal; I want the money and moral position that normalcy brings. (When I pretended normalcy in the past, the normals, who are named the English, stuck a lit bulb up my ass then shorted it.) I need to get married and get my certificate.

“In the real or abnormal world, it’s the law that Heathcliff is more me than me, though no one knows who Heathcliff is, his name.

“It’s disgusting for Heathcliff to live as a freak in my family’s world.

“I’m going to marry Linton so that neither Heathcliff nor I will have to live any more as freaks; for doesn’t marriage in this society render anything acceptable? Freaks cannot live as freaks because in reality there are no freaks: there are only those society people who’ve carved identities out of fear.

“Will I be able to be married without becoming perverted like one of those society people? I’m only human…

“Therefore, by means of marriage to a rich person, I will show that Heathcliff and I are as normal as rich people. I learned logic in school.”

Heathcliff overheard all of this. As soon as he had understood that it would degrade me to be with him, he ran out of the room.

This was how I threw myself or Heathcliff out of my life.

I had the following dream:

In a hotel that’s under the aegis of the Buddhist Poetry Institute, while I’m waiting for an elevator that’s going up, I recognize a man who’s walking past. He’s a former lover.

This hotel has a pool that’s composed of several uneven tiers.

The hotel’s bars and restaurants likewise hide the raised and lowered floors. My former lover and I sit down at a white- cloth-covered table in the most secluded alcove.

I feed him sake after sake, as I did when we used to fuck, and he becomes drunker, as also used to happen. All the time.

The initials of this man’s name, R.W., are those of a boyfriend prior to him.

Both of us are three-quarters sodden when I realize that this man didn’t and now doesn’t love me. His attitude toward me is: about once a year he uses me to try to find the oblivion for which he’s longing.

My Father (Whom I’ve Never Known) Tries to Kill His Own Child

Kathy says,

Hindley, who had become drunker and drunker, returned home, doused in alcohol like a rag in gas. The chill night howled through the dying branches and the dying cars started beeping. Inside, he grabbed the child which he had had by his new wife and cut off all its hair. Raggedly. When he let go of the brat, it fell down a flight of stairs. Didn’t die. Not noticing anything, father kept looking for the Jack Daniels which had been hidden.

All my life I’ve dreamt dreams which, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath. I DREAM: I’m in a hotel in which I’ve never before been. I have to give another performance.

Whenever I’m about to perform, I don’t like to be around the other performers. I wander by myself in the unknown hotel.

While I’m waiting in line for the elevator to go up, a man who’s also waiting recognizes me as a bodybuilder. He’s middle- aged, large in body with the beginnings of a pot, disappearing hair. Standing right in back of me so that I can feel the pot, his hands massage my biceps. I allow this.

Today is the day of sex. Informing me that he’s a trainer, the guy shows me how I can tuck my stomach in or he makes my stomach disappear.

We go down in the elevator. In the bathroom, he fucks me from the back just like I used to be when I was a kid.

Now that he’s gone, I’m desperate to find a man who will have me in order that I can become normal.

My next lover is married. (I fuck married men as a rule because they don’t want to come to close to me.) Predictably, the creep informs me that there’s no way he can love who I am.

After he tells me this, I squat down on his floor. Then I think, as I’ve thought before, many times, all I have to do now is get myself out of here. This house. As soon as I do this one thing, I promise myself, I can fall apart just as I want to: I can be less than anything that is.

Just as I have promised myself: outside his building, I sink against the garbage cans that are against the wall. I had probably created or passed through romance just so I could be here, where I should be, do what I should do.

Let the garbage eat out the night.

In that night, when two homeless recognize one of the members and walk up to me, the thought comes to me that I’m ready to pull myself up by the bootstraps.

My next lover is, as much as possible, the man of my dreams.

This time, there’s a mass of wharfs and compartments whose insides and outsides are mingled. Or mangled. In one of these rooms, this man and I lie on a bed. He can’t get hard. Female creatures, as elegant and lean as those in Paris, are haunting a few of the other rooms.

Outside the room in which I’m trying to fuck, something that’s a combination of truck and tractor is zooming away from the pier that’s nearest the horizon and down a white road that runs parallel to the dawn. Then, the vehicle swerves around, almost running into, five others. Monsters. All of whom are whizzing around and around, breath-taking speeds, hurtling past each other. The tractor-trucks are just like horses.

I watch them, amazed.

This is the realm of males. A man remarked to seemingly no one, “This is how things are done.”

After watching the monsters, I decide that I can’t marry my boyfriend because he doesn’t get hard.

But if I’m not going to marry, how can I survive in this society?

In the same room in which he couldn’t get it up, I’m teaching a class. One of my students asks me to dance.

We dance in an oval, around the back of the room just behind where the other students are sitting, as I had been taught to dance in the school I had attended as a girl. Waltzing and tangoing seriously and with grace.

Even though she appears fem, my student is leading me: I orgasm several times.

In this way I learn that, since I can come with a woman, I don’t need a man.

After I have come or alternatively:

For some time I’ve been standing, in front of a white stucco wall, on a white road which, as though it’s a platform, is raised above all the surrounding and dirt underneath. All around me are masses of luggage, suitcases and bags.

I’m leaving. Finally.

But as for me, I have too much baggage: I can carry all of them only with great difficulty. A man whom I don’t know offers to pick up all the suitcases and duffels that are dropping around me and then hand them to me.

While I’m just managing to hold on to these bags, two of the people who seem to be in my group screech, “She’s coming!” Race to, then down the pier that’s on the left side of the white building.

Now there’s a crowd of people down at the wharf. I want to be there too, but I’ve got all the bags. Deciding that probably no one’s going to steal them, I abandon them, follow the crowd, some of whom are my friends.

At the left pier’s end, a huge mass is watching a superstar, perhaps Tina Turner, come.

Now I know that there are two ways for me to survive without marrying: I can either be gay or famous.

The hell with dreams because dreams only lead to perversity.

I dreamt I was in Heaven. But I had no business being there so I ran back to Wuthering Heights (this place) (loneliness) (this state of human) (this impossibility named hell). I know that here is happiness.

I was the day after my most important performance. I was cleaning the hotel room which the Buddhist Poetry Institute had lent me; I always do exactly what I’ve been told to do.

A large wood vanity whose mirror was hidden under layers of clothing and cloths stood right in front of me. A mirror because I’m alone.

A, the Institute’s head, just opened my door and walked in. She hadn’t bothered to knock. She had entered in order to pay me. “I’m only going to pay those writers who matter.”

“Matter?”

“Who’re important.”

This message is that writers are either famous or starve.

While A was making her pronouncement, I was lifting up and folding a huge thick olive wool blanket. Beneath the blanket, a bare mattress.

Then A and I stood in front of the vanity’s covered mirror.

On the surface of the table part, some of the objects which I had uncovered during my cleaning now began to move. Two black crabs the size of human fists strolled. When I saw them, I was confident that I could kill the…things or, at least, crush them to pulp.

The whole table was alive. Specifics: two small black lobsters; two black spiders as large as these lobsters, whose legs resembled daddy-long-legs’ but who weren’t daddy-long-legs because their bodies were as substantial as cats’; the two crabs already recognized.

I lifted a dress, then a white wool crocheted cloth, then something which I couldn’t recognize or can’t remember off of the mirror and A and I clearly saw its glass.

The insects and the sea-life were crawling, or whatever they do, under the strewn olive blanket, all over the mattress, hiding in the wool folds. Down to the floor. They were disgusting.

Now I saw who I was: one spider perched, half of it on the top of my calf just below the back of the knee, half on my black cowboy boot. I’m not terrified of a spider because I know it can be crushed.

I slammed it to death.

A and I crushed all of the moving beings.

The Lack Of Dreams Is Disappearance Of The Heart

Kathy says, Heathcliff had left.

I said:

“My flesh is wood that needs to be chopped up. For this reason, I’m never going to forsake you, whatever-your name-is and wherever-you-are. The cunt is always speaking. But I will never marry you, whoever-you-are, because marriage means nothing to the likes of us because society means nothing to the likes of us.

“Heathcliff, you are now whoever-you-are because I am named absence.”

I BEGAN SEARCHING FOR HEATHCLIFF BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT HIM. AND I DON’T WANT HIM.

Searching for Heathcliff (trying to turn whatever-you-are actual), I fell out with my dreams.

The fantasy, to refuse to dream, to which I have returned again and again was the following:

The situation is that I’ve suddenly learned that I have an incurable disease. This disease has something to do with my heart. Because it’s inevitable that I’m going to become sicker and sicker until I die, an authority declares, someone from this moment onwards is going to have to take care of me until the day I drop dead.

But I don’t want some creep to have anything to do with me; I don’t want to be a dependent person.

A poet whom I like a lot begins to take care of me. Then, her husband becomes angry because she’s not giving him enough attention. I’m abandoned, the usual, and usual, become upset.

The authority who’s a doctor repeats: you have to find someone to take care of you.

I decide that everything that this doctor, perhaps because he’s and authority, has said is a con. That I’m ill’s a con. How can I be ill when I don’t know I’m ill?

I’m not ill.

One day, while I’m performing my morning exercises (since I’m exercising, I can’t be ill), I see, right across my mattress, my old nurse sitting meditating on the floor. I ask her advice. “Who’s the best doctor,” I inquire, “in the world? If I consult that doctor, he’ll be able to cure me if I’m ill.” I assure nurse that I have enough family money to afford the very best.

Consulting this best doctor: Wherever I am, which is (the) unknown, I look down on the handsomest possible man standing on a span bridge. As soon as I see him, my incurable disease is more or less cured. (I’m a romantic. Incurable.)

The next day or some days later, I see that my girlfriends, all of whom are now standing around me, are wearing the same kind of clothes: upper-middle-class cocktail drag heavy as possible. I’m in a gold sweater knit nothing else.

We stroll down a suburban street with its clean-cut lawns. One of the women, who works in a store, keeps tugging at my dress. Finally pulls out a thread. I’m irritated–I’m very irritable.

She exclaims, “You’re so white, delicate. You’re the most well-preserved of all of us.”

I no longer know whether or not I have this incurable disease.

Waking from the dream, I find myself in a business office. I describe what I’ve dreamt to a man who was in my dream in order that both of us can ascertain and know whether or not I’m going to die.

I had become almost sick with looking for Heathcliff.

I had stopped eating because, when he’s out on the moors, Heathcliff doesn’t eat. Wandered around the rocks at night because I didn’t know where he was.

I wasn’t looking for him.

The fogs made me animal.

Returned home. This is WUTHERING HEIGHTS by a deadhead.

Home. “Look,” my father said, “Look at the low-life. She’s ill because she’s always running after men. She’s going to be dead soon.”

“No,” I said to myself. I didn’t answer father because there aren’t any, anymore.

“So where were you last night, and the night before, you- good-for-nothing-cunt-juice?”

(A sailor named St. Germanus has unmasked the diabolical nature of certain spirits named good women who wander about at night.)

Father’s replica, the religious servant: “Weren’t you with Heathcliff last night?”

When that nut-case dared to question me, I became angry for two reasons: Because my family was considering me ill (nymphomaniac). Because underneath their definition lay the reality of my horniness. (Horniness: I don’t know where Heathcliff is so I don’t know who he is.)

Now I knew that it’s necessary to keep interpreting everything because nothing’s true and everything’s real. These interpretations are my body.

Therefore I said back to my family: “If you throw Heathcliff out of this house because he’s not like you, I’m going with him, out into the fogs. Our brains are already fogs. But you can’t do anything to Heathcliff because he’s gone.”

I had forgotten about myself.

I stopped looking for Heathcliff. After that, I could no longer sleep. I had lost the ways or entrances into dream.

Without dreams, the body becomes sick. I have an incurable illness of the heart.

I want (to find) Heathcliff (myself).

The Underside Of Dream

Kathy says, I’ve always been bratty. During the period when I was ill, though not yet dead, I turned into more than a brat:

“Ellen. Dye my hair blonde.”

“Your hair’s already blonde.” So she dyed my hair blonde.

“My hair isn’t blonde enough. I look like Madonna fucking. But I’m on my death bed because I’m dying. I want my hair to be pure white!”

She took me through two more dye jobs.

“Ellen. I said I’m dying. Now you have to make my pussy hairs white.”

But, alive or dead, my pussy drips gold and red and tastes like skunk.

Return To Dreaming

Heathcliff or the devil says, And so Kathy married a rich man for the purpose of entering society. As multitudes of women have done before her. The rich man, Linton, infatuated with his new wife, believed himself to be the happiest of men, as multitudes of men have felt before him. Kathy’s dream was that marriage is the destruction of society:

This society is the family’s house. Kathy’s living with her uncle in a huge house. It’s of the utmost importance that she palms him a check and equally important that no one knows that this has happened. If not, she’ll die.

Her uncle takes the check.

Later, a man woman and child are standing on the lawn outside the house. The evil Trinity: they continually cut themselves with razor blades. If they succeed in penetrating the house, they’ll destroy everyone and everything including Kathy.

Somehow they do. Enter. Kathy sees them in the downstairs; instantaneously she knows that she has to do everything possible and anything to prevent them from invading the inner dwelling: she has to remain an enclosed self: otherwise evil might stick its cock into her.

Next, she’s standing in front of the mattress over which she handed her uncle the check. He’s now on the other side of the mattress. She knows that evil is coming. So runs in back of the mattress. Up the stairs.

The house ascends higher and higher; the higher, the holier the space.

They’ve arrived at the top of the house. Now there’s only complete horror in this world: darkness and decay. Flesh is rotting frogs.

All evil has come here so a spell begins. This is real creation, the beginning of the world, evil is always born in a cloud of pink smoke emanating from pink incense.

Is Kathy seeing her own blood? She scoots as fast as she can, faster, down the stairs, faster, through the hallway cut into two by the light, out of the child’s house. Outside: through a patch of shade, then into sunlight.

(I have suddenly realized the meaning of MY MOTHER: DEMONOLOGY.)

In all the sunlight and cut grass, the child knows that she is safe.

Where will she go without home? She is homeless. She realizes that she can be safe (live) as a wanderer. Free.

She roams through the suburbs and finds herself at a filling station. While she’s leaning by one of the tanks, an American car drives up. (I don’t know the names of any cars.) The evil people are sitting in this car. Then Kathy sees a black man, who’s lying on a grey plastic parachute on the cement, look up, see whatever’s getting out of the auto (formlessness?), and scream, “God!”

A woman emerges from the car. Her inner thighs have no more skin, only blood.

My Childhood by Heathcliff

The law that forms society is that which forbids all that reeks of the name humanity. From the moment that I was born, I knew my society was corrupt. I knew that, in and through the name of democracy, the middle classes are being annihilated, that there are numerous tribes as depleted as the homeless.

My childhood training with Hindley taught me the characteristics of loyalty, honesty, stubbornness, and ferocity. Further, it caused me to disapprove of the familial society, the only society I knew, which indulged itself in every hypocrisy, corruption or putrescence, lack of control in every area of the self.

I became a handsome man, with a high-domed forehead, a square jaw. An air of authority lurked under every surface. My habitual garments of defenses identified me as a member of the samurai class.

Though I had as yet no dealings with anyone outside the family, I knew, and I was deeply upset by this, that samurai were starting to attend the local fuckhouses. When I came back to Kathy, real life returned to her: MY DREAM OF RETURNING TO KATHY:

Heathcliff says,

I was traveling, the same as flying, through rooms which were connected to each other so that their outsides were both outside and inside. The name: the crags of Penniston.

The room through which I was passing was either an expensive Eastern clothing store, a window that displays two fur and silk robes, or a Hindu temple. All the walls were the same yellow- white as the ground below them. Sand lay everywhere.

As soon as I had emerged from this temple’s recesses, I was presented with a photo of ‘imminent decline’. This photo revealed an at least 70% decline, a road composed out of sand and the rubble of a city. A few people are half-buried in its dust; a knee sticks upward.

A voice announced, “People have died here. But, at times, these are the only streets that can take people to where they’re going.

“The streets of death.”

Where I was heading, there was a chance of disaster, also of rain.

I parked my motorcycle facing upwards on a steep hill.

Whoever I happened to be in lust with at that time gave me the information that she had given permission to a friend of hers to ride my bike. That bitch had tipped it.

“What?” I couldn’t say anything else because–I’m almost never angry–my anger is always waiting to blow me up. Then, I became angry that there were no bike mechanics in the forsaken place. Then, I became angry that all she did was shrug. My lover just didn’t care. Finally and ultimately, I’m angry that I’m helpless.

Then, I realized that I could phone a mechanic myself so I did.

At the bottom of the decline, the crags, lay a building that was my family’s house. My real father, the one who had started everything, was inside this house.

I had made its livingroom into my bedroom; father’s bedroom, which was next to mine, was the actual bedroom of the house. We needed space from each other.

Below the normal rooms lay another level: a floor of unused rooms. In the past, something dreadful (or evil) had occurred in these unused rooms.

These are the rooms of childhood.

The unknown floor’s map was as follows:

The large room on the right was the most public, not pubic, knowable and known. Its windows on its outside overlooked an even larger parking lot which, unfortunately, belonged to the neighboring house.

Outside: “You’re not concerned for his welfare at all?”

“He’s on welfare?”

The rooms on the left formed a maze whose center was a bedroom. The bedroom. Will I ever find you?

In my search for freedom or in my search, I moved down to the hidden floor. The floor of childhood. When I had been a child, I did and now I do whatever I want to do.

In these hidden rooms, my first bedroom was the room on the right. Despite the parking lot lying right next to its insides, it was quieter than my former home.

I still hadn’t gotten what I wanted or I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. I want to be in the most secret bedroom of all.

Finally my father gave me permission to move in there.

I proceeded:

But just then, I saw outside that water was pouring, army- like, into, down the wide grey street. A wave was as high as my motorcycle. For the first time in my life, I felt fright: I was terrified that my cycle would be flooded.

I dashed outside; then the waters turned ferocious; I ran for safety. Home.

In the rain my bike died. I knew that I could have saved bike if I had ridden it into the house as soon as I had seen these waters coming.

In order to save bike, I turned time backwards:

When I rode my bike into the hall, my mother agreed that this situation was an emergency and that all is decaying. Here lies the smelly realms of the cunt.

Moving into the cunt:

First object to be moved from known floor to unknown floor: a large and low wood and green velvet table. (Note: Has to be cut into parts in order to be able to be moved.)

Second object: a blue exercise mat.

These necessities were too large for me to move myself. When I asked my mother, who must have hated my guts before I had been born because she had abandoned me, for help, for the first time she agreed.

Now I accepted my parents.

Inside the secret bedroom: When I had finished furnishing the three unknown rooms, they resembled or were the three known rooms (bedroom, workroom, and exercise room) in which I used to live.

In this manner, I returned to Kathy, reached into her secret place, and made her my image: In the name of anything but the parent:

In the smelly realms of the cunt.

Kathy’s Dream Of And Upon Heathcliff’s Returning To Her And Laure’s Dream

Kathy says, Somewhere in Thrushcross Grange I was packing my suitcases because I was getting out. Finally.

Then, I dragged these bags down to my bedroom where I packed what I didn’t want.

When I had packed both what I wanted and what I didn’t want, I found myself next to Heathcliff. Sitting on a stoop just as if we were back in New York City, Heathcliff started burning some of my skin with his cigarette.

A boy named Linton with whom both of us were friends sat on my other side. He and Heathcliff burned me.

Since he’s my main man, Heathcliff was the one who talked. “I’m deciding who you are.”

As soon as he had said that, I felt happy. Happiness was a mingling of feeling and physical heat; the liquid flooded the caves beneath my skin.

Heathcliff told Linton, “I own her.”

I Return To B

I was sitting in a theatre, watching a movie named Wuthering Heights. I had no idea which version. On the movie screen, I saw Kathy telling Heathcliff, who had just returned to her, that the only thing she wants in life, now that almost no life is left to her, is for her and Heathcliff not to part. Never to part.

Heathcliff, “But you did everything possible to ensure our parting.”

Kathy answers that she only wanted them to be together.

Across the screen, I see this word spread:

THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD IS THE KINGDOM OF LUST.

I had come back to the theatre night after night. Wood walls and the bare and hard wood chairs that I remember from my school days: those auditoriums in which movies were then shown. But this was a real movie theatre, not a schoolroom. And this night, when I sat down and the room became totally black except for the light from the screen, I placed my purse, as I always do, under my seat.

During my former visits to the theatre, I had become friendly with a man named Jerry. As Wuthering Heights rolled on to the death of Kathy, Jerry asked if he could sleep with me.

“But first,” Jerry in the black, “I have to show you something.”

He showed me that the top of his head was bald.

No, it was something else.

He opened his chest. Most of the chest, its center, was without skin, like an Invisible Man model. I saw right through to his plastic heart.

But I didn’t want to fuck with him for another reason. Because he wasn’t into what’s imprecisely named S/M.

There was no movie.

Bored, and I hate more than anything to be bored, I left my seat to get a drink. When I returned and picked up my bag, I noticed it felt light. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

Since I no longer had cash or credit cards, I was forced by circumstances to enter a brothel.

I have always found myself determined to survive.

The cathouse in which I landed obviously catered to upper- crust clients. For there were deep pink velvet curtains and no other visible walls.

To my surprise I liked my first John.

Then a murder took place; the victim was this first John. Was I possibly the murderer?

Because we had to ensure that we weren’t caught, some girls and I began escaping from the whorehouse. As I loped down a long and narrow hall, I gazed upon a black satin evening bag which looked expensive. On a tiny, antique mahogany table. I snatched the bag because mine had been taken from me. But thought that it’s wrong to steal.

The steep street outside our working quarters had become steeper: my friends and I could barely climb up it. I was wearing very high-heeled shoes because I was a whore. Here there was no hope of running away. I was aware that openly carrying this purse rather than investigating its insides, keeping only what I wanted and throwing away all the rest, was even more dangerous.

I opened the black evening bag. At this moment I told the other girls about my theft. They didn’t give a fuck. I extracted the bag’s belongings; I preferred a pair of earrings to money.

The girls and I decided that we were going to be thieves.

I found myself inside a brothel which was probably the original one, though I couldn’t remember how that brothel had looked.

The vestibule in which I stood was the lobby of a movie theatre. All of its velvet, cunt pink.

I was watching a policeman talking to or interviewing the movie’s ticket-taker. All sorts or documents concerning the murder were on my person. Of course I had done it. The policeman who was in the ticket booth didn’t notice or care about either my documents or my being; none of the cops walking around the whorehouse cared about the hookers. Already, hookers and thieves, we decided we could be murderers.

Heathcliff, my brother.

September 25, 2013

Remarks, Notes, Introduction and Other Guest-Editorial Texts Prefacing Postmodern Culture’s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

Larry McCaffery

Department of English
San Diego State University

Dedication: For Ronald Sukenick and William T. Vollmann

The Final Measurement: Guest-Editor’s Remarks Prefacing Postmodern Culture‘s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

 
I.  *Epigraphs*

I. 1
Was there no end to anything?  When would he reach the final
measurement?
     William T. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows

I. 2
As writers--&
everyone inscribes
in the sense
I mean here--
we can
try to intensify
our relationships by considering
how they work; are we putting
each other to sleep
or waking each other up;
and what do we awake to?  Does our writing stun
or sting?  We can try to
bring our relationship with readers to
fruition
that the site of reading becomes a fact of value
    --Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption

I. 3
"You see what's happening here you take a few things that
interest you and you begin to make connections.  The connections
are the important thing they don't exist before you make this.
This is THE ENDLESS SHORT STORY."
    --Ronald Sukenick, The Endless Short Story

II.  *Editor's Preview of Contents for the Issue:*

I.   Epigraphs:
        I. 1.  From William T. Vollmann
        I. 2.  From Charles Bernstein
        I. 3.  From Ronald Sukenick
II.  Editor's Preview
III. Editor's Prefatory Note
IV.  This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology
          Editors Play--Towards a Consideration of the Aesthetic
          Conventions of the Fiction Anthology as a Literary
          Genre.
     IV. 1  ". . . Unusual formal principles and aesthetic
          features . . ."? ". . . despite the inherent
          fascination involved . . ."?
     IV. 2  List of Fiction Anthology Categories and Potentially
          Useful Postmodern Applications
     IV. 3  Additional Bonus For Critics Developing a Postmodern
          Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology Who Are Also
          Interested in Postmodern Music.
     IV. 4  Establishing the process of collaborative
          interactions between anthology's editorial introduction
          and fiction selections (a process which joins these two
          seemingly different forms of discourse into an
          aesthetic unity; summary of the absurdities,
          limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise from
          following out-dated approaches to such introductions;
          sequential listing of the topics resulting from
          adhering to these conventions.
     IV. 5  Postmodern Textual Practices and the Editorial
          Introduction
V.   Introduction: Cancelled (See Editor's Apology)
     V. 1  Fiction Selections Coded for Postmodernist Features
           Appendix A: Kathy Acker introductory comments
     V. 2  Contributors' Notes
VI.  Appendices B, C, D, E, F.

     Fiction Selections in the Issue:

     Kathy Acker, "Obsession"
     Robert Coover, "Title Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky
          Pierre"
     Ricardo Cruz, "Five Days of Bleeding"
     Rikki Ducornet, "From Birdland"
     Rob Hardin, "Dressed to Kill Yourself"
     Annemarie Kemeny, "Attempts on Life"
     Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early
          Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography")
     William T. Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer"

*III.  EDITOR'S PREFATORY NOTE:*  Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

          I began writing some of the following material
in late May and early June 1992, just before I departed
San Diego for a nine-week stay in Tokyo to begin work on
a project ("Postmodernism in Japan") funded by an N.E.H. summer
research fellowship.  Although traces of that initial draft
remain embedded in the current version (mostly in Part V), what
readers now have before them differs so significantly in content
and approach from my earlier drafts that for all practical
purposes the two are completely different texts.  During that
May-June period when I began to develop my editorial
introduction, I had already accepted five pieces of fiction for
the issue--this out of the total number of six or seven
selections, agreed upon by myself and Eyal Amiran, Postmodern 
Culture's co-editor, when I accepted his offer to guest-edit a
focus of his and John Unsworth's journal devoted to Postmodern
Fiction.  Thus I began my editorial introduction assuming that I
had only to make an additional one or two selections for the
issue, insert a few extra remarks into the draft of my
introduction regarding the relevance of the new material to the
issue as a whole, contact the authors when I returned from Tokyo
on 8-31 to make certain they had sent Eyal their selections on
computer discs, and then my duties as guest editor would have
been completed.
     When I departed for Tokyo on 6-27 I recall feeling quite
confident and optimistic that these duties would be discharged
successfully, and the template I had developed for my
introduction reflected these feelings.  There were good reasons
for this optimism.  The material I already had in hand for the
issue was strong, both individually and in the ways the works'
stylistic and thematic concerns represented various key features
associated with postmodernism (see V. 1 coded listing of
selections).  Moreover there was also an interesting mixture of
authors and works: a selection from one of the already-canonized
authors from the 60s "boom period" of postmodernism (Coover);
work from two authors who had begun work in the 70s--Kathy Acker
(now widely recognized as a central and controversial arrival on
the postmodernist scene, and Rikki Ducornet, a writer whose works
were now beginning to be recognized and praised); a piece by Marc
Laidlaw, whose mid-80s novel, Dad's Nuke, was recognized within
the genre of science fiction as a major cyberpunk novel, but
whose overall literary accomplishments had been obscured or
distorted by his association with genre writing; and one
relatively anonymous young author (Ricardo Cruz) whose garish,
surrealist depictions of urban ghetto life seemed to me to be the
most original fiction about black life I'd seen since the early
Ishmael Reed.  The selections also included several different
types of postmodernist innovations, ranging from Coover's
typically outrageous forays into myth, media, sex and death, to
Ducornet's delicately rendered, magical realist fables, whose
lyricism often serves to highlight the "diabolism" of her
"macabre fantasies," Cruz's "rap fiction," and so on.  I was also
taking with me to Tokyo several other promising works by authors
I respected, as well as expecting to receive submission from
several authors who hadn't yet replied to my original letters of
inquiry or to Postmodern Culture's call for fiction.
     During my stay in Tokyo I periodically re-read the materials
I had brought with me, as well as a few intriguing possibilities
that were sent to me by Eyal (incidentally, I had considerable
editorial input from Eyal at each step of this project's
evolution); by the time of my return to San Diego on 8-31, we had
narrowed down our options to a few selections.  Eyal and I set a
tentative date of September 12 by which to have made the final
selections for the issue; this would give me the week of
September 12-19 to complete my introduction, arrange for the
discs to be sent to Eyal, and generally handle the final details
for the issue (the September 19 date was my own personal deadline
for completing all the work on the issue, since I would be
leaving then for Boulder, Colorado to take part in the Novel of
the Americas Conference being held during the week of 9-19 to
9-26).  However, upon arriving back in San Diego, ripples began
to appear on editorial waters that had been up to now
extraordinarily smooth.  Within a week, a real storm was brewing.

The forces responsible for this were various, some relatively
minor (there were problems getting discs from the authors) and
some involving financial issues, miscommunications, dozens of
phone calls that crossed back and forth across the U.S. like ping
pong balls or Pynchon yo-yos, and even the confusion of agents
and publishers about how the new literary "space" of electronic,
computer driven data should be defined or categorized....
[EDITOR'S NOTE: I find it too painful from a personal standpoint
to continue with this summary except to say to my readers that
the labyrinthine series of darkly humorous events that unfolded
from 9-5 until 9-19 were...beyond the pale.]

*IV.  This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology
Editors Play By--Towards an Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology*

     Like all other literary forms, anthologies are language
games--structures of words with distinctive generic properties
which arise due to a system of conventions and semiotic rules
that govern its operations.  As with the rules and systems of
transformation in all games, those at work in anthologies not
only set limits on what can (and cannot) occur, but also channel
operations into certain pattern of recurrence.  The principles
underlying the anthology game are, of course, only vaguely sensed
by readers (if at all) and even most anthology editors are
themselves aware of them only intuitively.  Given the primacy
afforded artistic "originality" in Western aesthetics, it's not
surprising that (to my knowledge) no one has ever given serious
attention to studying the anthology as a literary form.  Not only
is the "final product" of an anthology, as well as the editorial
process involved in its creation, essentially collaborative in
nature, but the different functions played by editor and
contributor have encouraged people to see the roles as being
essentially separate.  The result is that most readers and
critics have regarded anthologies less as literary forms in their
own right and more as simply arbitrary structures that
"contain" literary objects.
     Without belaboring the point, and admitting the fact that
having spent a lot of time and energy over the past several years
putting together fiction anthologies devoted to various topics
(see the Contributors' Notes), let me just suggest that now is
the appropriate time for someone (thought the time is definitely
not appropriate for me) to develop a serious discussion
exploring the aesthetic of anthologies generally--and of the
fiction anthology as a literary genre in particular.  The
timeliness of such an exposition results from the unusual formal
and aesthetic features of fiction anthologies, the rich series of
topics such an analysis would need to delve into, the ways that
such a discussion can be linked to concepts operating in
postmodern fiction and in poststructuralist and deconstructive
critical theory--not to mention the fact that it hasn't occurred
to anyone to develop such an essay, this despite the inherent
fascination involved in developing such an essay.

*IV. 1  " . . . unusual formal principles and aesthetic features
. . . "?  " . . . despite the inherent fascination involved
. . ."?*

Indeed, consider the enjoyment and intellectual stimulation
involved in working out a definition of the fiction anthology as
a genre, working up a typology that best describes the different
sub-categories and permutations that comprise the genre, the
satisfaction of gradually beginning to recognize how much FUN it
will be for you to take this hitherto despised form--a form that
in fact will not even be recognized as a distinctive literary
genre until your essay bursts onto the academic scene--and then
being able to show off your critical skills by applying a barrage
of complex-and-trendy terms and implications drawn from recent
critical theory, the secret satisfaction you'll derive throughout
the process of developing your essay by anticipating the ways
your peers' initial derision and bewilderment at your choice of
topics will gradually be transformed, first to a begrudging
respect, then to astonishment, and eventually to shame and
embarrassment at having ever doubted you.  Consider the following
(the categories that apply to this current anthology are
indicated in *bold*):

*IV. 2  Listing of categories,          *Aspects of PO M
subcategories, other variables that          aesthetic practices
determine specific aspects of the            and critical theory
form and content found in any                that can be used in
individual anthology (incomplete)*           developing a theory
                                             of the formal
Anthology's scope and eventual               properties of
     length is left open to editor           fiction anthologies
     or restricted to a maximum of           (incomplete)*
     (100, 200, 300, 400 or more)
     pages, or limited to (3-5, *6-     Citation of the relevancy
     8*, 8-10, 10-15, 20 or more)            of such works as
     contributors                            Pale Fire
Selections to include previously             (Nabokov),
     published fiction or                    Ficciones
     *restricted to unpublished*             (Borges), If on a To 
                                        include works by women or 
                                        men or Winter's Night a 
                                        *both* Traveler (Calvino)
Selections restricted to those          Death of the author
     written by authors of a            Imagination as plagiarism
     specific racial, sexual, or        Strategies of
     ethnic orientation *or not*             appropriation,
Anthology to include *any* form of           collaborations and
     fiction that fits the focus or          intertextuality
     to include only specified
     genre fiction (SF, Regency         Familiar categorical
     Romance, Detective, etc.) or            oppositions between
     only work non-generic works or          subjective/objective
     a mixture?                              "creative"/non-
Anthology's focus is based on                creative denied.
     commonalities theme or             Valorization of
     aesthetic tendencies or on              "creative" over non-
     links with specific periods or          creative writing
     *literary movements*                    questioned
Anthology to appear as a book or as     Endless play of
     a *special issue of a lit               signifiers
     journal* which you are *guest-     Bakhtin's heteroglossia
     editing* or regular editor of      The changes in meaning
To be published by a commercial              that result from
     house or small press or                 moving a text from
     *university press*                      one context to
Audience whose reading tastes and            another
     interests the anthology is         Denial of author as
     aimed for is mass market (male          originator of
     or female or both), academic,           discrete meaning
     *"serious" readers*, cult          Sampling as central po mo
     audience (many options)                 aesthetic
Editor is professional (with no,        Strategies of misreading
     some, a lot of) experience or           and re-reading used
     *doing this on the side*                to create
Contributors to be paid (no money,
     some money, major bucks) for       Foregrounding of the
     contribution                            process of creation,
Editor to be not paid or paid                emphasis on the
     (small or *middling* or large           contingencies and
     flat fee) *in* (royalties or            personal choices
     in royalties plus an advance            involved in
     which is small, medium large).          aesthetic creations,
The deadline for the editor to have          the willingness to
     completed all aspects of his            reveal that seeming
     role is (less than 6 months,            "natural" or
     *6-12* months, 1 year or 2              "objective" patterns
     years, more than two years),            and conclusions
     or no fixed deadline.                   result not from
                                             their relationship
                                             to any exterior
                                             state of truth or
                                             actual conditions
                                             but from aesthetic
                                             choices

*IV. 3  Additional Bonus Provided to Critics Interested in the
Postmodernization of Contemporary Music:*

Consider developing an extended discussion that suggests how the
aesthetic issues you're describing for fiction anthologies are
analogous to those found in the recent appearance of so many
"cover" albums (and there are many categories of such
"anthologies" of musical materials)--e.g., The Coolies' Dig,
Pussy Galore's Exile on Main Street, Cicone Youth's The White 
Album, and the series of "cover" albums produced by Hal Wilner.

Since processes and products related to sampling are so central
to rap and postmodern music generally, feel free to explore the
implications of their use in terms of such concepts as
intertextuality, originality, the effect of cut-and-paste methods
on meaning, etc..  Develop the analogy of anthology editors to
rap master DJs behind the board, mixing and cutting, using their
intuition and audio memories to mix and match sounds, riffs and
phrases in ways that open up new aesthetic and thematic aspects
of prior materials, that communicate to knowledgeable audiences
via reference and intertextuality.  Perhaps point out the more
subtle point that the role of anthology editor would really be
analogous to a DJ only if the anthology being assembled contained
only previously published fiction.  If it included only new
fiction, you'd need a slightly different analogy.  Be sure to
note the sorts of interesting issues raised by the aesthetics
underlying rap and fiction anthologies.  For example, is
"borrowing" unfamiliar materials "more creative" than sampling
materials people should know?  Is it possible for a musician to
not borrow materials?  In what sense?  Should strategies that
fundamentally rely on appropriation, sampling, or collaboration
be considered "creative" at all?  In what ways does the recent
tendency to problematize authorial originality and the
distinction between "literary" and "critical" writing provide
ways of thinking about fiction anthologies as literary forms?

*IV. 5  Establishing the process of collaborative interactions
between the anthology's editorial introduction and fiction
selections (a process which joins these two seemingly different
forms of discourse into an aesthetic unity); summary of the
absurdities, limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise
from following out-dated approaches to such introductions;
sequential listing of the topics that result from adhering to
these conventions.*

     The options available to anyone hoping to assemble an
interesting fiction anthology are virtually unlimited.
Unfortunately, there are considerably fewer options available to
editors once it comes time to write the editorial introductions
that accompany such anthologies.  As with book reviewing,
editorial introductions are essentially written according to a
formula that controls the overall structure, tone and content of
the discourse--a formula whose main features have evolved
primarily to serve the private interests of the editors and their
publisher rather than to serve any necessary generic function.
No matter how complex or unique the anthology's focus, how
creatively and flexibly the editor has used this focus in the
selection process, no matter how original the fiction selections
are in terms of formal innovation or thematic complexity--in the
end, nearly all editorial introductions follow a sequence of
presentations that can be listed as follows:

1. Attention-grabbing opening paragraph that establishes why the
anthology's theme or focus is particularly important now,
usually accompanied by references to the inadequacies of other
anthologies with a similar focus.
2. Details introduced regarding the background of the anthology,
how this editor became involved in the project (here modest
indications of how the editor's professional background and other
credentials make him or her particularly suited to put together
such an anthology), what the anthology's original aims were (and
hence what sorts of considerations were involved in the selection
process), and a summary of how these aims changed or remained
consistent as the volume took shape.  [See Appendix C.]
3. Brief, "punchy" overview of the anthology's contents.
4. Presentation of information regarding the authors' lives,
citation of previous most significant publications, literary
movements associated with the authors, etc..
5. (Optional.)  Roll call of other authors considered for the
anthology (if applicable) with reasons why any expected figures
aren't represented.  If necessary, comments designed to blunt
charges of the anthology's imbalances (gender, race, etc.),
justifications for any political incorrectness that might be
perceived in selections, followed by suggestions of what
misreadings on part of the reader created such perceptions.
6. Citations regarding the appropriateness of the selections in
terms of the anthology's focus; justification for any pieces that
at first glance seem very much out of focus.
7. Overview of notable themes and stylistic features (examples
and quotations to support this list), followed by favorable
comparisons of this anthology with rival anthologies that may
have preceded it.
8. Claims made for the overall significance of the anthology
material, pronouncements about how the individual aesthetic and
thematic features found in the anthology's fiction relate to
broader trends within and outside of literature.
9. Concluding paragraph which reveals ways this anthology's
selections indicate rich possibilities, new directions, etc..
10. Final sentence designed to get the reader to turn the page as
quickly as possible.

     The problem here isn't that these formulaic elements are all
trivial or inappropriate.  The problem is the formulaic nature
of the formula, the tendency of editors to pass off hasty and
usually self-serving conclusions based on inadequate sampling of
their subject.  Rather than follow many postmodern authors who
try to develop methods that permit them to find systems and
significance but who do so honestly by acknowledging their own
subjectivity and actual, less-than-systematic experiences, many
editors feel it necessary to adhere blindly to a formula whose
elements encourage dishonesty, misrepresentation, superficiality,
and manipulation.  At least in anthologies that introduce new
work by serious fiction writers, such introductions are nearly
always the product of bad faith--the bad faith of editors who
know better but deliberately attempt to reduce ultimately
uncategorizable works to "trends," "patterns," or labels, the bad
faith of literary guides who've been living inside this rich
literary terrain for weeks and months, and who've been damn
excited about how untranslatable the stuff is, and how resistant
it is to the kinds of paraphrases and overstatements the editor
is expected to make in the introduction.  This isn't to say that
editors shouldn't present their views and point out trends or
patterns--after all, though finding a pattern in the stars may be
primarily an act of the creative imagination, such patterns help
people locate themselves and find out where they're going.
Editors should express their opinions in a performative act that
strives to break through the discursive screens of traditional
editorial representation to the repressed, authentic data of the
material at hand.
     [Editorial Note, Los Angeles, 9-25.  As explained in
Editor's Note for V. Intro (Cancelled), circumstances made it
impossible for me to complete some sections of this Editorial
Introduction (such as the actual Editorial Introduction itself).
I am, however, able to provide readers with some discarded
fragments of the concluding paragraph that I worked on some time
ago (see Appendix F) which should clarify what I would have said
if circumstances had been different.

*V.  Introduction (Now Cancelled)*

[EDITOR'S APOLOGY:]  Due in part to the time and energy required
to develop the earlier sections of his remarks concerning the
need for an aesthetics of fiction anthologies, partly because of
circumstances beyond his control, and partly because he doesn't
wish to risk the bad faith referred to earlier, the editor
regretfully acknowledges that he will be unable to supply the
editorial introduction.  To compensate for this, and to provide
readers with easy access to the relations between these works,
the editor is providing in lieu of an introduction a listing of
the anthology selections marked with a handy series of symbols
whose meanings are explained below.  He is also supplying
contributors' notes for each author (because these are usually
supplied at the end of an anthology they are often overlooked by
readers); for readers interested in what the editor might have
said in the (Now Cancelled) "Introduction," he is also including
an appendix containing a fragment of material originally intended
for the "Introduction" (See Appendices C-F).

*V. 1.  Listing of Anthology Selections with Easy-to-Use Coded
References for Easy Reader Access to their Postmodern Features*

Kathy Acker, "Obsession": A(1,3),B,C,E,F,G,H,J,K,L,M,N,O(2),
     P,Q,S,T,U,W,X,Y.
Robert Coover, "The Titles Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky
     Pierre": A(1,2), C,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,O(1,2),P,R,S,T,U,V.
Ricardo Cruz, "Five Days of Bleeding": A(1,2,3),E,F,G,H,I,K,L,M,
     O(1),P,Q,R,S,T,U,W,X.
Rikki Ducornet, "From Birdland": C,F,H,I,K,N,T.
Rob Hardin, "Dressed to Kill Yourself": C,D,E,F,H,J,K,O(2),P,Q,R,
     S,T,U,W,X.
Annemarie Kemeny, "Attempts on Life": A(2),B,C,E,F,P,R,S,T,V.
Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early
     Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography"):
     C,D,E,F,G,K,N,O,Q,R,S,T,U,V.
William T. Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer": B,C,E,F,G,
     K,N,O,P,Q,S,T,U,W,Y.

Explanation of Symbols:

A(1): Avant-Pop--appropriation of style and content of pop
     culture.
A(2): Avant-Pop--appropriation of style and content of pop
     culture to subvert pop culture.
B:    Strategies of confounding the usual distinctions between
author/character, fiction/autobiography, "real" history and
invented versions.
C:    Meta-features.
D:    Cyberpunk features.
E:    Non-linear methods of presentation.
F:    Process over product.
G:    Collision of different world or planes of reality motif.
H:    Radically idiosyncratic voices and idioms employed.
[Note: continue through Z.]

=================================
*Appendix A: Commentary About Kathy Acker and "Obsession,"
Written by Editor for a Different Project--for Possible Sampling
Purposes in the (Now Cancelled) Introduction*

[Note: Once Larry realized that he did not have much time before
the deadline to write a completely new version of this
commentary, he planned to paraphrase it, or "sample" it (self-
plagiarism).  --Eyal.]

          Like her fiction, Kathy Acker is a bundle of
     contradictory parts that combine to create the jagged unity
     of a Raushcenberg collage.  Street-wise gutter snipe and
     radical feminist critic, motorcycle-outlaw and vulnerable
     woman, cynic and visionary idealist, Acker writes a series
     of experimental, shocking, and highly disturbing novels that
     present perhaps the most devastating (and wickedly funny)
     critique of life under late capitalism since William
     Burroughs' mid-60s works.
          These works include her 1970s small press publications
     (The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, by the Black 
     Tarantula; I Dreamt I Became a Nymphomaniac!; Imagining;
     The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, by Henri Toulouse 
     Lautrec; and Kathy Acker Goes to Haiti); her "re-writes"
     of classical Western novels Great Expectations and Don 
     Quixote, as well as works that pastiche a broader variety
     of prior literary works: Blood and Guts in High School,
     Empire of the Senseless, and In Memoriam to Identity.
          "Obsession" offers an illustration of the ways Avant-
     Pop authors appropriate, sample, and otherwise collaborate
     with prior texts drawn from the realms of both "high" and
     "pop" culture; it also showcases Avant-Pop's tendency to
     blur the distinction between author and character--a device
     which emphasizes the individual's imaginative role in
     constructing any version of "reality" and the interaction of
     "fiction" and "fact" in our media-soaked environment.  In
     "Obsession," Acker--in one of her typically bold narrative
     manoeuvers--adopts the roles of Cathy and Heathcliff, the
     passionate and ultimately doomed lovers from Emily Bronte's
     19th century masterpiece, Wuthering Heights.  But as
     Avant-Pop authors often remind us, "re-telling" a familiar
     story within a contemporary context permits readers to re-
     think the assumptions and "meanings" they bring to such
     materials.  "Reanimated" by Acker's surrealist imagination
     and fiercely political vision, the elements of Bronte's
     novel are transformed into a nightmarish vision of the
     sexual longings, gender confusions and injustices to be
     found in contemporary society.
          Also typical of Acker's work is her focus in
     "Obsession" on the body as a literal and symbolic site/cite
     of struggle between individuals seeking self-empowerment and
     the forces of patriarchal control that seek to regulate
     people's lives.  This emphasis is grounded in more than
     abstract political concerns.  As a real woman and not just a
     narrative person, Acker is her own text, her own gallery.
     Embedded i*n one of her front teeth is a jagged chunk of
     bronze.  She's a body-builder in more than the usual way:
     her muscles animate spectacular tattoos, a combination that
     she feels allows her to seize control over the sign-systems
     through which people "read" her.  Past mistress of the
     cunning juxtaposition and the Fine Art of Appropriation,
     Acker writes fiction that betrays a multitrack outlaw
     intellect.  And she doesn't shrink from mining outlaw "low
     culture" genres like SF, pornography, and detective fiction.
     The net effect of her work is not merely to deconstruct, but
     to decondition.

*V. 2  Contributors' Notes*

Kathy Acker's most recent publications include: Portrait of the 
     Eye (a collection of three early novels) and In Memoriam 
     to Identity.  The selection included in this issue is from
     a forthcoming novel to be published by Random House in the
     Spring of 1993.  She is also recording an album featuring
     her work set to music that Hal Wilner is producing, and
     rides a 750 Honda.

Robert Coover recently spent two years developing teaching
     applications using hypertext in creative writing courses
     (this pilot program was sponsored by Apple).  Professor of
     English at Brown University, he is the author of numerous
     novels and stories, including most recently Pinocchio in 
     Venice.  The fiction selection included here is part
     of a long experimental novel, The Adventures of Lucky 
     Pierre, which Coover has been writing now for over twenty
     years.

Ricardo Cruz's fiction has appeared in various literary journals,
     including Fiction International and Black Ice Magazine.
     His first novel, Straight Outta Compton (Fall 1992,
     Fiction Collective Two), was recently named winner of the
     Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction.  Currently
     "out and about" in Bloomington, Illinois, he is completing
     work on his Ph.D. in English at Illinois State-Normal.

Rikki Ducornet is the author of six volumes of poetry and a
     tetralogy of novels--The Stain, Entering Fire, The Fountains 
     of Neptune, and The Jade Cabinet--that will be
     published by Dalkey Archive Press.  Also known for her work
     as an illustrator of such works as the limited edition of
     Robert Coover's Spanking the Maid and Borges's "Tlon Uqbar
     and Orbis Tertius," Ducornet is Professor of Creative
     Writing and Literature at the University of Denver.  A
     forthcoming issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction
     will be devoted to her work (The Guest-Editor of this issue
     wishes it to be known that he is currently seeking materials
     for this issue).

Rob Hardin is a writer and musician living in NYC who reports
     that writing is the way of "getting linear dissonant
     counterpoint--the chamber music nightmare and empty attics--
     out of my system."  His poetry has appeared in numerous
     magazines, including Mississippi Review, Atomic Avenue,
     and Flagellation.  His recent album credits include The
     Lost Boys and Billy Squire's Here and Now.

Annemarie Kemeny teaches and is completing work on her Ph.D.
     at the Department of English, SUNY Stony Brook.  She
     has published criticism and poetry.

Marc Laidlaw has spent most of his adult life in office
     buildings, writing on company word processors.  His works
     include an early cyberpunk novel, Dad's Nuke (1985), a SF
     novel abut Tibet, Neon Lotus.  The selection published in
     this issue has appeared in print in Great Britain in New 
     Worlds 2, ed. David Garnett (Victor Gollancz, Ltd.).

Larry McCaffery is co-editor of Fiction International,
     American Book Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary 
     Fiction, and editor of Storming the Reality Studio: A 
     Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction(Duke
     UP).  Two new books will appear in 1993: Interviews with 
     Radically Innovative American Authors (Pennsylvania UP) 
     and Avant Pop: Postmodern Fiction for the 90s, which will
     appear in the new Black Ice Books Series (Normal, IL:
     Fiction Collective Two).

William T. Vollmann's recent publications include Whores for 
     Gloria, An Afghanistan Picture Show, Thirteen Stories & 
     Thirteen Epitaphs, and Fathers and Crows (the third of
     Vollmann's projected septology of "Dream Novels").  Research
     for his books has taken him recently to Cambodia, Mexico
     City, Sarajevo, and the Magnetic North Pole.

=================================
VI.  *Appendix B: Editor's Log: 1/92--In the Beginning...*

     Before the word was the grant application for contributors'
and editor's honoraria for a special issue of Postmodern Culture
devoted to "Postmodern Fiction."
     1-92.  Postmodern Culture's co-editor Eyal Amiran contacted
me, Larry McCaffery (for his background as an editor and critic
associated with postmodernism, see contributor's notes), early in
1992 to discuss my willingness to guest edit this special issue.
I agreed and we set up a basic gameplan: I would arrange for the
appearance of approximately half dozen previously unpublished (in
the U.S.) pieces that, in my view, illustrated significant formal
and thematic tendencies within postmodernism; to this end, my
selection process would avoid narrow or prescriptive definitions
of what constituted "postmodernism," emphasizing the quality of
material over "name recognition," although I would attempt to
include at least some fiction by established figures (Pynchon,
Sontag, Gaddis, Coover, Barth, Rushdie, Abish, McElroy, Le Guin,
Barthelme, and Burroughs were all specifically mentioned in our
preliminary phone conversations, and, indeed, were subsequently
invited by me to submit fiction for the issue).  I would also try
to include writings by some of the most interesting recent
authors, and selections from work that would come in response to
Postmodern Culture's calls for fiction; I would supply an
introduction which would place my selections in a general
framework of postmodern aesthetics generally, and which would
clarify whatever significant differences and similarities
characterize the older and younger generations of postmodern
authors.  Deadline for my having all the materials in the
editors' hands would be mid-September, with the issue going out
on-line at the very end of the month.

=================================

*Appendix C: Unrevised Fragments of Editor's (Now Cancelled)
Introduction*

1.  ...I agreed to accept his invitation to edit in part because
I felt the process of putting such an issue together would
contribute to the process of re-evaluating my own views about
postmodernism.  This process started several years ago, when now,
and has grown out of a series of recognitions in the mid-80s
about the limitations and strengths of my earlier positions about
postmodernism, that I was already fullyI was alredayworking on
suchpretty certain that whatever in part on question that the
literary sensibilities on encounters in the best writing coming
out of the younger generation of vital, innovative American
authors has been shaped by a very different set of cultural
circumstances and aesthetic considerationsvery different indeed
from those that gave rise to the first wave of postmodern
experimentalism back in the mid 60s...one generation's daring
metafictional explorations about the relationship between author
and text becomes the most effective tool of the 90s realist
attempting to depict a world in which "signs," "texts," and
various other fictions have proliferated to such an extent that
they form the most substantial aspect of most people's existence.
2.  ...no attempt was made to fill pre-designated slots or
categories...what was surprising was the sheer volume of quality
fiction written by the generation of innovative writers who have
grown to maturity in the 80s and 90s...halfway into my selection
process, Eyal Amiran had agreed with my suggestion that we aim
less for a balance of fiction by younger and more established and
concentrate instead on foregrounding work by emerging writers,
using selections from the canonical postmodernists by way of
showcasing aesthetic and thematic continuities or divergences
between the generations.
3.  Ducornet's camera serves as it does for some many other
younger writers, as a magical mirror possessing the power to
petrify the past, illuminate and momentarily petrify human truths
that usually evaporate under life's process of perpetual change.
     ...a selection from perhaps the most versatile stylist,
ventriloquist of all...quirky American dialects, bad jokes,
willingness to push a trope until every aspect of it had been
squeezed dry..."Lucky Pierre" is an excerpt from a legendy blue
movie special, now over twenty years in the making.  More than
most other 60s figures, Coover's best work from the 60s is linked
directly to writers like DeLillo, Leyner, the cyberpunks and the
later authors whose work is so often drenched in a kind of
constant breath surrealism and intertextual play, and whose prose
is so frequently drenched in a kind of techno-media poetics.
     Cruz, appropriate that when his interrelated sequence of
stories about life in the ghetto finally came together into a
novel, Straight Outta Compton appropriate on several levels--
the sheer intensity and sensuousness of his voice, the sheer
vitality and anger and low-down ache of passion and the mixture
of surprise, delight and playfulness with which they respond to
the set of surprises that ghetto life has in store for them
moment-to-moment.  Cruz is the first black writer I've
encountered who seems to have integrated rap's developed a prose
voice, narrative
     [Editor's Note: Apologize in Ed. Note that I can't even
provide fragments of the Kemeny because I left my only copy of
her story behind in San Diego and did not receive the fax of her
story sent by Eyal.]
     Laidlaw, Alphabetical structure, near science fictional tale
of, associated with c-p but possesses a lyricism, verbal control,
and intellectual delicacy that has more in common with Calvino or
Steve Erickson (whose non-appearance is regretted).
     William Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer."  This is
although the 90s postmodernists have only just begun the process
of shifting gears into a decade that almost certainly is going to
pick up speed and recklessness as the millennium approaches, but
from this vantage point there's no question that William T.
Vollmann has got a headstart over every other member of his
generation in terms of opening up new narrative opportunities and
laying aside the temerity and failure, hesitation, and general
figure of will that seemed to lie heavy over the generation of
authors appearing in the late 70s and early 80s fiction.
Certainly no American author since the arrival of the canonized
behemoth Thomas Pynchon has appeared with the combination of
reckless ambition, verbal gifts, and an intuitive feel for
inventing narrative strategies capable of rendering this vision.
     "Incarnations of the Murderer" displays many of the
tendencies that make Vollmann's work seem so original and fresh.
As is typical of most of his other work, "Incarnations" deals
with brutality and those troubling emotional regions where
extremes of passion and love are transformed into their equally
vivid opposites.  Also typically, Vollmann never allows a scene
or a motif to remain static; instead, his imagination is
constantly at work transforming the scenes and characters into
variations designed to present new insights into materials that
more traditional story-telling methods would use to make us feel
comfortable, that we have understood their essence.
"Incarnations" also displays Vollmann's characteristically
prismatic handling of point of view--having matured in the
aftermath of the experiments of writers like Burroughs, Mailer,
Vonnegut, and Coover.  Vollmann has taken ways of integrating
authorial experience, collaborating with prior texts, and
imagining inventive narrative to new levels.  The risks he has
managed to take at this pint, both personal and narrative, are
astonishing.  For all the attention paid to presenting even the
most ugly and poignant scenes and people even-handedly, there is
a deeply moving sense of Vollmann's personal engagement, his
sense of moral outrage while witnessing the cruelties and
stupidities human beings can inflict on each other.  The risk of
insisting on personally witnessing such acts of human folly as he
documents in his fiction are burnout, having one's imagination or
aesthetic judgement overwhelmed by the emotionality of such
experiences.  For now, though, at least for this reader, the
sense of personal risk and danger has served Vollmann admirably.
Surely if nothing else, Vollmann is helping to dispel the sense
that postmodern American fiction has floundered under the weight
of its own selfconsciousness.

=================================
*Appendix D: Fragment found at bottom of page while developing
conclusion to section IV. 5.*

     As I hope this "traditional" portion of my Introduction
indicates, one can be fully informed about the ambiguities and
limitations of any speech act; the tendency of all authors is to
try to mask their confusion and personal insecurities behind a
barrage of phoney rhetoric.  This does not, however, relieve the
author of the responsibility of attempting to draw conclusions
about issues that might be of some use.  It also doesn't mean
that the process of engaging one's mind regularly with
challenging topics can't be fun, or that the only options with
topics one cares about deeply are to adopt the hypocritical or
smug stance of the know-it-all or to mutter embarrassed
apologies.  Displays of either adopt either the hypocritical
stance of the or the hanghyupocritical finding a way to present
what your conclusions are and how you arrived at them has to be--
your conclusions and attitudesthat one can't expressand ones
words withothers migwith as much mean, however, metaphorss well
asaware of the limitations of an individual to draw
conclusionsones         and the postmodern seems torisks
havepleasurethe risks have been worth itevident--pursuing this
itye"breakthrough" in terms of casting off the authorialtaking
off on the perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Vollmann's
writing in terms of postmodern aesthetics--namely, his treatment
of point of viewworkIn terms of

In order to give language the opportunities to stretch out
muscles it rarely uses, the narrative structures in these
selections tend to be flexible, open-ended, the "plot" capable of
veering off suddenly in several possible directions.  Ironically,
such structures can be seen as presenting a palpable and
"realistic" sense of our world, with its constantly shifting
series of signs systems and cultural codes producing surreal
juxtapositions, a sense of media overload...exhilaration and
confusion.

to commentaryverbalash of expectations, the strangesurreal
fusings of wherenothern equally familiar butnother context that
is equally familiar butthe familiar elements drawn from
differentcontexts into strange anddifferent sorts
ofAestheticsQuestiolns of "realism" aside, however, using the
free flowing narrative structures ofbarrthe sorts ofemiotic
excess andthe constantly shiftingexploring its itself shared
conviction that language's ability to transform our
consciousness, a certain confidence that fiction's potential to
create illusions that can shock and awaken, that language can
enlight and...put in the service of confront banality
counterability building language's power to that fiction in the
powerabsorbed lessons of 60s literary radicalyounger the strength
ofanew critical categories and terms arise with accelerating
frequency in an attempt to keep pace with the appearance of the
"new," the "exotic," and the "now"...fueled by a hysterical
denial of the inevitability of bodily decay, old age and death,
full of self-loathing for physical imperfection, obsessed with
preserving one's experiences into images and sounds that provide
the closest approximation of immortality allowed postmoderns,
deeply suspicious of anything that cannot be soothingly
controlled, "captured," replayed, most Americans have almost
gladly accepted a life of banality in exchange for the creature
comforts provided by its Daydream Nation; as reading becomes less
central to the process whereby people are educated and understand
each other, its significance retreats generally...on any given
evening in America, the number of people sitting transfixed by
game shows, their vestigial instinct toward self-improvement
satisfied by the random bits of data occasionally tossed their
way, outnumbers all the Americans who will read a book this year
by a factor of 10 to 1.  comforting reassurance that the American
Dream of instant transcendence is real...you gotta believe your
own eyes, right?  the postmodern spectacle of the Rodney King
trial, in which our citizens deeply felt intuition that they
can't really trust the images comprising their postmodern
world...
 are insubstantila, trickssuspicions about the illusory, awaht
you see iwhich people comfort themselves and writing becomes
increasinglytheandretreated into a dangerously somnolent  or
anything else that cannot be controlled or rationally the
powerful difference--a relentless and ferocious pursuitanything
that postindustrial capitalism, with its relentless difference
engine, continues toproduced by thesodemanded by the logic of
jaded consumers awahsare relentlesslyas the logic of
postindustrial capitalism's difference engine, help distributors
and bookstore ownerfocus the consumption of fiction and other art
"products"direct the somnolent readers waiting patiently for the
latest poll to let them know what they think or feel about
something,epheality ofdifficulty

=================================
*Appendix E: Early Draft of Comments Editor Planned to Use in His
(Now Cancelled) "Introduction," Regarding Robert Coover's "Lucky
Pierre" Selection (Remarks Which Would Also Have Helped Establish
the Recurrent Pattern of Media-Induced Confusions, Reality Decay
and Loss of Individual Identity Evident in Several of the
Anthology's Selections).*

One of the features that distinguished work by the 60s generation
of postmodernists was their willingness to confort ashad to do
with their of the brash band of
     Back in the early to mid-1960s, as Thomas Pynchon, John
Barth, Susan Sontag, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald
Barthelme and others were making it clear that a new generation
of American writers were in their ascendancy, one
particularly fresh angle of their work had to do with their
presentation of technological change generally and "pop culture"
in particular.  And the writer no otherrelationir take on
are direction their work area of shard interest that made their
work seem so fresh and genuinely "new" had to do with their
exploration of how technological change and pop culture was
transforming American life--and the new art forms arising to meet
this transformation.  Most of these writers had experienced the
thrill of Saturday afternoon serials and cartoons (followed
perhaps by a Gene Autry Western or Hardy Boys movie), had
collected bubblegum cards emblazoned with British and American
fighter planes; they could recall Truman's announcement that a
new weapon had been used against the Japanese in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and they recognized the significance once their family
radios were replaced by a television set.  There was something
profound about such changes, of course, because in addition to
transforming the physical space they were inhabiting, these
developments were having deep and largely untheorized effects on
their imaginations, what they dreamed of and were frightened by.
Just as importantly, these things were affecting perception
itself--movies taught writers how narrative materials could be
cut-up, juxtaposed, what could be eliminated, tv ads provided
insights about how to present information-dense materials
economically, how to be didactic without tipping your hand too
obviously, how principlesIn short, the 60s generation of
postmodernist authors was the first to begin to explore the Media
Scape that gradually began to occupy more and more of America's
attention, its dreamslifeaffectingThese developments wereAll this
was f having first time they saw television.memories of the vast
transformations that accompanied the war, were old enough to
remember a time when the family gathering around the radio each
evening was still a novelty,evening radioThis was the first
generation of authors who had grown up immersed in Media Culture
, who were the firsthow popular new terrain they began to stake
out was the effect that the mediamutual concern of the key areas
ofthe first brash band of postmodern fiction writers were just
bursting upon the relatively staid American literary scene,
Robert Coover quickly established himself as one of the brashest

=================================
*Appendix F: Fragment of Discussion to be Used in the (Now
Cancelled) "Introduction" regarding Recurrent Motifs in
Postmodernism and the Current Issue (with Supporting Quotes)*

Recurrent references to the proliferation of images created by
cameras (including video and movie cameras), the sense that
photography is akin to magic in its ability to allow humans
visual access to that which is normally invisible (the past, the
dead, inner psychic states), the more ominous implications that
by giving such previously ineffable or abstract states of being a
tangible existence has created an entryway through which
illusion, the dead, and the past will soon overrun "real" and the
living and the present.
          Inventor of the praxiscope technology (*which see*),
     Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of
     physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to
     direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of
     nature.  Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was
     offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer
     instantaneous viewing of any subject's thoughts.
               --Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness"
Postmodern Authors living in a contemporary world dominated by
Media Scape, simulated experiences, Virtual-and-Hyper Realities,
often literalize the metaphorical components of previous eras'
attempts to poeticize the mysterious nature of truth and
falsehood, life and death, reality and illusion, originality and
duplication.  Thus, Robert Coover places his hero Lucky Pierre
into a cinematic narrative realm in which "All the world's a
stage, and each must play his part, etc.."
     As technologies of reproduction create counterfeit worlds
that become increasingly lifelike and offer an ever-expanding
array of simulated experiences, the fleeting "real time"
experiences of individuals begin to seem increasingly less
substantial precisely because they cannot be replayed.

September 25, 2013

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essentially in French.

     To subscribe to the journal, send the command SUB AXE-LIST
Firstname Lastname (where these are the first and last names of
the individual subscriber) bt electronic mail to the addressee:

               LISTSERV@VM1.MCGILL.CA

     Electronic subscribers will receive instructions on how to
order a list of available articles, how to retrieve full texts of
these articles, and how to cancel subscriptions.  To make access
to the journal more manageable, access is provided to individual
articles rather than entire issues.  However, interested readers
may order all articles from an issue.  Inquiries for the list
should be sent to Janusz PRZYCHODZEN at McGill University in
Canada (CXZN@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA).

     AXE-TALK is the AXE Journal discussion group.  Subscriptions
to AXE-TALK are independent of subscriptions to AXE-LIST; if you
are not a discussion group subscriber and would like to be, send
command SUB AXE-LIST Firstname Lastname by electronic mail to the
address:

               LISTSERV@VM1.MCGILL.CA

     A directory of all AXE-LIST articles are available on
Comserve.  To obtain the list, send the following command to:

          LISTSERV@VM1.MCGILL.CA:  INDex AXE-LIST

2)---------------------------------------------------------------

_The Centennial Review_

Edited by R.K. Meiners

The _Centennial Review_ is committed to reflection on
intellectual work, particularly as set in the University and its
environment.  We are interested in work that examines models of
theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human
sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents
in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures;
that questions the cultural and social implications of research
in a variety of disciplines.

Issues now available:

Fall 1991: _Discourses of Mourning, Survival, and Commemoration_
Articles by James Hatley, Donald Kuspit, Tony Brinkley, and
Joseph Arsenault, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Peter Balakian, R.K.
Meiners, Louis Kaplan, Haqns Borchers, Morris Grossman, Berel
Lang, David William Foster; Poetry by Dimitris Tsalouman, Sherri
Szeman, Walter Toneeo, Henry Gilfond, Elizabeth R. Curry, Peter
Balakian.

Winter 1992: _Cultural Studies_  Articles by Douglas Kellner,
Eyal Amiran, John Unsworth, and Carol Chaski, Steven Best, Janet
Staiger, Jeffrey Seinfeld, Charles Altieri, Tony Barnstone;
Poetry by Hillel Schwartz, Robert Hahn, Michael Atkinson, John
Hildebidle.

Spring 1992: Articles by Stephen Gill, Peter Baker, R.M. Berry,
Carole Anne Taylor, Michel Valentin, Edward M. Griffen, Robert
Erwin, Ronald Hauser, Karl Albert Scherner (trans. Ronald
Hauser), Diana Dolev and Haim Gordon, Albert Feuerwerker, Donald
Lammers, Ileana A. Orlich.

Subscription rates:      1 year/$10.00  2 years/$15.00
                              Single Issue/$5.00
                    (postage outside the US: please add $3.00)

Make checks payable to:

_The Centennial Review_
312 Linton Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI
48824-1044

3)---------------------------------------------------------------

_College Literature_
A Triannual Literary Journal for the Classroom

Edited by *Kostas Myrsiades*

"In one bold stroke you seem to have turned _College Literature_
into one of the things everyone will want to read."
     Cary Nelson

My sense is tat _College Literature_ will have substantial
influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies."
     Henry A. Giroux

A journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and
contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy."
     Robert Con Davis

Forthcoming issues:

     Cultural Studies: Theory, Praxis, Pedagogy
     Teaching Postcolonial Literatures
     Europe and America: The Legacy of Discovery
     Third World Women
     African American Writing

Subscription Rates:      US             Foreign
          Individuals    $24.00/year    $29.00/year
          Institutional  $48.00/year    $53.00/year

Send prepaid orders to:

_College Literature_
Main 544
West Chester University
West Chester, PA  19383

4)---------------------------------------------------------------

          FINEART FORUM GETS NEW PUBLISHER

FineArt Forum, the international electronic newsletter, is now
being published by the Mississippi State University/National
Science Foundation Engineering  Research Center for Computational
Field Simulation (MSU/NSF ERC).  Its new editor is  the English
artist Paul Brown, a member of the MSU Art Faculty.

Founded in 1986, FineArt Forum is one of the longest established
electronic news letters for the arts.  It is distributed monthly
via the Internet and provides the artworld with information about
new developments and opportunities in art &  technology.  For the
past six years it had been published by the International Society
for Arts Science and Technology (ISAST) on behalf of the Art,
Science and  Technology Network (ASTN).  However in November 92
ISAST lost grant income which supported the newsletter, and the
MSU ERC offered to take the title over.   ISAST will remain the
distributor, sending it out to subscribers along with its own
on-line publication, Leonardo Electronic News.

The MSU ERC has been supporting art and technology since it was
founded in 1990.  It runs a number of interdisciplinary courses
involving computer animation and  electronic imaging. Last year's
student animations were widely exhibited and appeared on
television both in the USA and overseas.  Last summer Paul Brown
joined  the faculty, in a joint appointment with MSU's Department
of Art,  to develop new opportunities including a graduate
program in Computational Design.

Brown had previously founded the UK's National Center for
Computer Aided Art &  Design and later helped establish
Australia's Advanced Computer Graphics Center.   As an artist he
has been working with computers for almost twenty years and has
exhibited and published in Europe, Australia and the USA.
"I have been writing about art & technology for a long time and
jumped at the  chance to edit FineArt Forum", he explained.
"It's an ideal vehicle for exploring new forms of electronic
publication.  Also many more people from the artworld  now want
to learn about this new area and there's a growing demand for
sources of information".

FineArt Forum is distributed on, or around, the 1st of the month.
Subscribers also receive Leonardo Electronic News on the 15th.
To participate you need  access to the Internet (which is
available via many of the commercial networks).   Send an e-mail
message to:  fast@garnet.berkeley.edu with the content:   SUB
FINE-ART your-email-address, first-name, last-name, and postal
address.

Like a lot of the network publications it's free.

For further information and images contact: Paul Brown Editor,
FineArt Forum MSU/NSF Engineering Research Center PO Box 6176
Mississippi State MS 39762-6176 601 325 2970 601 325 7692 fax
brown@erc.msstate.edu

5)---------------------------------------------------------------

                         _F.A.S.T_
Fine Art, Science and Technology Electronic Bulletin Board and
Data Base
Current Developments in the Application of New Technology
to the Arts Around the World

     * Calendar of Worldwide Events
     * Electronic Newsletters: Leonardo Electronic News
     * Sections on Holography, Space Arts
     * ISAST Member News
     * Job Listings
     * Directory of Resources: Grants, Fellowships, Funds,
          Organizations
     * Bibliographies and Book Lists
     * Words on Works: A special section where subscribing

          artists describe new artworks.
     *Profiles of Organizations

F.A.S.T. (Fine Art, Science and Technology Electronic Bulletin
Board) covers all applications of Science and Technology to the
Arts.  Topics include computer graphics and animation,
applications of artificial intelligence to the arts, applications
of computers to music, holography, robotics, telecommunications
and art, video, computer literature, and new materials in the
arts.

The Directory includes artist-in-residence programs and a list of
curators who are interested in art which uses technology.

In addition, F.A.S.T. contains an archive of FineArt Forum
newsletters so that subscribers may review back issues.

The F.A.S.T. Bulletin Board not only allows rapid access to
information, but also allows subscribers direct contact with
other subscribers interested in the application of new
technologies to the arts.

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

The F.A.S.T. Database is updated weekly.  Leonardo Electronic
News is published monthly (the 15th).  A 1-year subscription to
F.A.S.T. (expiring one year from date of your activation access
to F.A.S.T.) may be obtained electronically for $40 (individuals)
and $100 (Educational Libraries).  ISAST members are entitled to
a discount subscription rate of $20.00/year.  Leonardo Electronic
News may be delivered by surface mail for an additional charge of
$55.00/year for members and $65.00/year for non-members.

In order to subscribe to F.A.S.T., the user must have access to
The WELL conferencing system.  This system uses the phone lines
to transmit information thus a modem is also necessary.  There is
a charge for subscribing to this as well as access charges from
the phone company.  The WELL is the system on which we post
Leonardo Electronic News, and the various bulletin boards and
calendars for F.A.S.T..

The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is centered in the San
Francisco area with an international access through Compuserve.
The WELL includes private electronic mail, public and private
conferences, and storage files.  Information about the WELL is
available via e-mail at info@well.sf.ca.us or by calling (415)
332-4335 or writing The WELL, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA
94965.  When you subscribe to The WELL, please mention that you
are doing so in order to have access to F.A.S.T., we get a small
credit for each referral.

Reduced access charges are available via PC Pursuit and
Compuserve Packet Network.  Contact The WELL for further
information.

It is also possible to receive F.A.S.T. on diskettes.  Each
diskette (5 1/4/ MSDOS diskettes, ASCII text, double-sided,
double-density) contains all of the information on F.A.S.T. for
the current quarter.  This includes three issues of Leonardo
Electronic News, the calendars, selections from Laser News, Words
on Works, Space Art News, Member News, the organizations and e-
mail directories, the latest bibliography and the job listings.
Each diskette is $17.00 for members and $25.00 for non-members,
annual subscription rates (four diskettes) are $60.00 for members
and $90.00 for non-members.

For additional information about ISAST, or to become an ISAST
member. contact:
     ISAST (International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and
            Technology)
     672 South Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
     Tel: (415) 431-7414 or fax: (415) 41-5737
     Email: fast@garnet.berkeley.edu

For further information about FineArt Forum or F.A.S.T., send
email to fast@garnet.berkeley.edu (internet) or FAST@UCBGARNE
(bitnet).

6)---------------------------------------------------------------

_FutureCulture_

Requests to join the FutureCulture E-list must be sent to:
future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu

The subject must have one of the following:

subscribe realtime  -subscribe in realtime (reflector)
format
subscribe digest    -subscribe in daily-digest (1 msg/day
subscribe faq       -subscribe to faq only (periodical updates)
unsubscribe realtime
unsubscribe digest
unsubscribe faq
help                -send help on subscribing and general info
send info           -receive info on the FutureCulture
mailing list
send faq            -this file

FutureCulture list maintainer and keeper of this FAQ:
andy
ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu
ahawks@mindvox.phantom.com

While no article that attempts to document an entire emerging
subculture can be complete, I will do my best to give you enough
complete and accurate information to get you on your way to the
future.

This article will focus mainly on cyberpunk culture, rave
culture, Industrial, po-mo, virtual reality, drugs, computer
underground, etc..  Basically, the elements that make up the
developing techno-underground, the new edge, the technoculture.

Included in this article will be: suggested readings--books
magazines, zines, requisite authors, BBSes devoted to relevant
topics, corporations and merchandise geared toward the techno-
aware, Internet e-mail addresses for figure-heads in this area,
suggested music and movies/videos, FTP sites, etc..

Contact on Internet: ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu.

7)---------------------------------------------------------------

_GENDER, LANGUAGE, AND MYTH_
Essays on Popular Narrative

edited by *Glenwood Irons*

_Gender, Language, and Myth_ is a collection of fourteen papers
on popular romance, detective, western, science fiction and
horror.  Authors included are Jean Radford, Tania Modleski, and
Leslie Fiedler (on romance); Marcus Klein, John Cawelti, and Jane
Tomkins (on the western); Glenwood Irons, Scott Christianson and
Umberto Eco (on detective and espionage); and Harold Schecter,
Carol Clover, and Robin Wood (on horror).

University of Toronto Press
50.00/cloth (Cdn)
18.95/paper (Cdn)

8)---------------------------------------------------------------

_GNET: an Archive and Electronic Journal

Toward a Truly Global Network

Computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet
they are not truly global--they are concentrated in affluent
parts of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.

GNET is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort
to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts
of developed nations (Net access is better in many "third world"
schools than in South-Central Los Angeles).  GNET consists of two
parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion.

Archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the
directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1).  To
conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each
document, as well as the full document (Those without ftp access
can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval).

In addition to the archive, there is a moderated GNET discussion
list.  The list is limited to discussion of documents in the
archive.  It is hoped that document authors will follow this
discussion, and update their documents accordingly.  If this
happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal.  Monthly
mailings will list new papers added to the archive.

We wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to
visionary.  Suitable topics include, but are not restricted to:

     descriptions of networks and projects
     host and user hardware and software
     connection options and protocols
     current and proposed applications
     education using the global net
     user and system administrator training
     social, political or spiritual impact
     economic and environmental impact
     politics and funding
     free speech, security and privacy
     directories of people and resources

To submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated
discussion list, use the address gnet_request@dhvx20.csudh.edu

Larry Press

9)---------------------------------------------------------------

_THE INTERNET COMPANION_
A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking

Tracy LaQuey
Editorial Inc.
Software Tool & Die
and
The Online Bookstore (OBS)
Are Pleased to Announce...

The first simultaneous electronic and print publication of a
major new book: _The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to
Global Networking_  by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (Addison-
Wesley, $10.95.

Online copies of Vice-President-elect Al Gore's Forward and the
first two chapters of this best-selling book are available via
anonymous FTP from:

world.std.com

in the directory:

/OBS/The.Internet.Companion/

Further chapters will be released in the future.  See README
and COPYRIGHT files in that directory for more details.  Direct
comments and questions about the book can be sent to:

internet-companion@world.std.com

This pioneering effort is a step in bringing together the on-line
electronic and print media, enabling authors to explore new
avenues of publishing their works.  Comments, inquiries, etc.
welcome.  Send to:

obs@world.std.com

10)-------------------------------------------------------------

_THE LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW_

The _Law and Politics Book Review is now available on the gopher
server at Northwestern University:

gopher@nwu.edu.

Choose "Northwestern University Information" on the first menu
and "Law and Politics Book Review" on the next menu.

Herbert Jacob
Northwestern University
Voice Mail (708) 491-2648
e-mail  mzltov@nwu.edu

11)--------------------------------------------------------------

_NOMAD_

An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Humanities, Arts, and
Sciences

_Nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as
intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing.  The
journal is a forum for those texts that explore the undefined
regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing.  For
information, contact:

Mike Smith
406 Williams Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL  32306

e-mail:
Paul Rutkovsky

12)--------------------------------------------------------------

_NON SERVIAM_
The Radical Electronic Newsletter dedicated
Stirner's Philosophy of Egoism

Editor: Svein Olav Nyberg 

_Non Serviam_ is an electronic newsletter centered on the
philosophy of Max Stirner, author of "Der Einzige und Sein
Eigentum" ("The Ego and Its Own"), and his dialectical egoism.
The contents, however, are decided upon by the individual
contributors and the censoring eye of the editor.  The aim is to
have  somewhat more elaborate and carefully reasoned articles
than are usually found on the news groups and lists.

Introductory file:

"Non Serviam!"--"I will not serve", is known from literature as
Satan's declaration of his rebellion against God.  We wish to
follow up on this tradition of insurrection.

In modern times, the philosophy of the individual's assertion of
him//herself against gods, ideals, and human oppressors has been
most eloquently expressed by Max Stirner in his book "Der Einzige
und Sein Eigentum".

Stirner, whose real name was Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1805-56),
lived in a time dominated by German Idealism, with Hegel as its
prominent figure.  It is against this background of fixation of
ideas that Stirner makes his rebellion.

For the more formal part, though the letter is centered on
philosophy and ideas, articles on topics relevant to true egoists
will also be admitted.  The prime requirement is that the
articles are not on-line ranting, but serious attempts to convey
something of interest and relevance.  Articles on literature
through the ages are fine, stories will be welcomed if they are
appropriate, and I even think I might fall for an article on
french cuisine made easy...  However: If in doubt whether an
article will accepted, ask ne by personal mail first.  A waste of
time is a waste of time.

I hope to be able to make each of the issues of the newsletter
thematic, that is we will have one main theme in each issue.  The
main theme is not meant to be the sole content, however, but more
of an inspiration for writing.

Editor and List owner: solan@math.uio.no

13)--------------------------------------------------------------

_Poetics Today_

Edited by Itamar Even-Zohar

International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and
Communication

Subscription Rates:

Individuals: $28
Institutions: $56
Single Issue: $14

(Add $8 for subscription outside of the US)

Send Check, money order, credit card number to:

Duke University Press
Journals Division
6697 College Station
Durham, NC 27708

Call of FAX between 8:00 and 4:00 EST with your VISA, MasterCard,
or American Express order.

Phone:  (919) 684-6837
FAX:    (919) 684-8644

14)--------------------------------------------------------------

_POSITIONS_

East Asia cultural critique offers a new forum of debate for all
concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events
unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.  Profound
political changes and intensifying global flows of labor and
capital in the late twentieth century are rapidly redrawing
national and regional borders.  These transformations compel us
to rethink our priorities in scholarship, teaching, and
criticism. Mindful of the dissolution of the discursive binary
East and West, _POSITIONS_ advocates placing cultural critique at
the center of historical and theoretical practice.  The global
forces of that are reconfiguring our world continue to sustain
formulations of nation, gender, class and ethnicity.  We propose
to call into question those still-pressing, yet unstable
categories by crossing academic boundaries and rethinking the
terms of our analysis.  These efforts, we hope, will contribute
toward informed discussion both in and outside the academy.

_POSITIONS_ central premise is that criticism bust always be
self-critical.  Critique of another social order must be self-
aware as commentary on our own.  Likewise, we seek critical
practices that reflect on the politics of knowing and that
connect our scholarship to the struggles of those whom we study.

All these endeavors require that we account for positions as
places, contexts, power relations, and links between knowledge
and knowers as actors in existing social institutions.  In
seeking to explore how theoretical practices are linked across
national and ethnic divides we hope to construct other positions
from which to imagine political affinities across the may
dimensions of our differences.

_POSITIONS_ is an independent refereed journal.  Its direction is
taken at the initiative of its editorial collective as well as
through the encouragement from its readers and writers.

To subscribe to the triannual magazine beginning in Spring 1993
write to:

Mr. Steve A. Cohn
Journals Manager
Duke University Press
6697 College Station
Durham, NC  27708

To submit a manuscript send three copies to:

Tani E. Barlow
Senior Editor
94 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114

or e-mail: Barlow@sfsuvax1.edu.

15)-------------------------------------------------------------

_PUBLIC CULTURE_

Edited by Carol A. Breckenridge

Engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural
flows and public cultures in a diasporic world.

Fall 1992 issue (Vol. 5, Number 1): "ON WRITING THE POSTCOLONY"

     *  Hindu/Muslim/Indian             Faisal Fatehali Devji
     *  The Habit of Ex-Nomination      Anannya Bhattacharjee
        Nation, Woman and the Indian
        Immigrant Bourgeois
     *  Narrativizing Postcolony             Tejumola Olaniyan
     *  The Banalities of Interpretation     David William Cohen
     *  Save the African Continent           V.Y. Mudimbe
     *  The Magic of the State               Michael Taussig
     *  Mbembe's Extravagant Power           Judith Butler
     *  The Vulgarity of Power          Michel-Rolph Trouillot
     *  Disempowerment.  Not.                John Pemberton
     *  Can Postcoloniality be Decolonized?  Pernand Coronil
     *  Machiavellian, Rabelaisian,          Dain Borges
        Bureaucratic?
     *  On the Power of the Banal            Michele Richman
     *  Prosaics of Servitude and            Achille Mbembe
        Authoritarian Civilities        (Trans. Janet Roitman)

_Public Culture_ is now published by the University of Chicago
Press and will move from two to three issues per year.  For the
general reader the subscription rate will necessarily change from
$10 dollars per year to $25.  For students it will remain at $5
per issue or $15 dollars per year.  _Public Culture_ trusts that
readers will continue to enjoy this enhanced publication.

Forthcoming special issues will include one guest edited by Lila
Abu Lughod on television in the Third World and another guest
edited by Benjamin Lee on public cultures/public spheres in which
China figures prominently.

Write to:

_Public Culture_
University of Chicago
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
USA
tel. (312) 702-0814 and (312) 702-5660
fax. (312) 702-9861
E-mail CBRE@midway.uchicago.edu

16)--------------------------------------------------------------

_PYNCHON NOTES_

Editors

John M. Krafft
Miami University--Hamilton
1601 Peck Boulevard
Hamilton, OH 45011-3399

E-mail:  jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet  or
jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu

Khachig Tololyan
English Department
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT  06457-6061

Bernard Duyfhuizen
English Department
University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
Eau Claire, WI  54702-4004

E-mail:  pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet  or  pnotesbd@cnsvax.uwec.edu

_PYNCHON NOTES_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall.

Submissions: The editors welcome submissions of manuscripts
either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy
disk.  Disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; IBM-compatible, Microsoft
Word, and WordPerfect 4.1 or later.  Manuscripts, notes and
queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to
John M. Krafft.

Subscriptions: North America, $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per
year (or double number);  Overseas, $6.50 per single issue or
$12.00 per year, mailed air/printed matter.  Checks should be
made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.  Subscriptions and back-
issue requests should be addressed to Bernard Duyfhuizen.

_PYNCHON NOTES_ is supported in part by the English Departments
of Miami University--Hamilton and the University of Wisconsin--
Eau Claire.

BACK ISSUES

_PYNCHON NOTES_ has been published since October 1979.  Although
most back issues are now out of print, they are available in the
form of photocopies.

Nos.   1-4:  $1.50 each; Overseas, $2.50

Nos.  5-10:  $2.50 each; Overseas, $3.50
Nos. 11-17:  $3.00 each; Overseas, $4.50
No.  18-19:  $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00
No.  20-21:  $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00
No.  22-23:  $9.00;      Overseas, $12.00
No.  24-25:  $9.00;      Overseas, $12.00

Khachig Tololyan and Clay Leighton's _Index_ to all the names,
other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _Gravity's Rainbow_ is
also available.

_Index_: 5.00; Overseas, $6.50

All checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
Overseas checks must be payable in US dollars and payable through
an American bank or an American branch of an overseas bank.

_PYNCHON NOTES_ is a member of CELJ
the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals.

17)--------------------------------------------------------------

_Sub Stance_

Edited by *Sydney Levy and Michel Pierssens*

Published: 3/year  ISSN: 0049-2426

_Sub Stance_ promotes new thoughts by leading American and
European authors which alter the perception of contemporary
culture--be it artistic, humanistic, or scientific.  The journal
represents literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art
criticism, and film studies.

Rates:         Individual (must pre-pay)     $21/yr.
               Institutions                  $68/yr.
               Foreign postage               $ 8/yr.
               Airmail                       $25/yr.

We accept MasterCard and Visa.  Canadian customers please remit
7% Goods and Services Tax.

Please write for a free brochure and back issue list to:

Journal Division
University of Wisconsin Press
114 North Murray Street
Madison, WI 53715 USA

Tel:  (608) 262-4952
FAX:  (608) 262-7560

18)--------------------------------------------------------------

_TAPROOT_

Edited by Luigi-Bob Drake 

Reviewers: Deidre Wickers, Jake Berry, Bill Paulauskas, Nico
Vassiliakis, Bob Grumman, Tom Beckett, Roger Kyle-Keith, and
Luigi-Bob Drake.

Fall 1992 Issue 1.1

_TapRoot_ is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground,
and Experimental language-centered arts.  Over the past 10 years,
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats.  In August of 1992, we began
to publish _TapRoot Reviews_, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications which are primarily language-oriented.  The
printed version appears as part of a local (Cleveland Ohio)
poetry tabloid, _The Cleveland Review_.  This posting is the
electronic version, containing all of the short reviews that seem
to be of general interest.  We provide this information in the
hope that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs.
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:

au462@cleveland.freenet.edu

Requests for e-mail subscriptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free.  Please indicate what you are requesting.
Hard-copies of _The Cleveland Review_ contain additional review
material.  In this issue, reviews & articles by John M. Bennett,
geof huth, Micheal Basinski, Tom Willoch--as well as a variety of
poetry, prose, and grafix.

_TapRoot_ is available from: Burning Press, P.O. Box 585,
Lakewood OH  44107--2.50 pp.  Both the print & electronic
versions of TapRoot are copyright 1992 by Burning Press,
Cleveland.  Burning Press is a non-profit educational
corporation.  Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR
NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this introductory notice
is included.  Burning Press is supported, in part, with funds
from the Ohio Arts Council.

19)--------------------------------------------------------------

_XB_

A bibliographic database of the literature of xerography,
(photo)copier art, electrostatic printing, and electrographic
art, seeks data and materials about the form copy art & the use
of duplicative printing technologies for cultural or artistic
purposes by artists or non-artists for input into the Procite
bibliographic software for Macintosh.  An ongoing art
information-information art project, _XB_ requests submissions
especially in machine-readable form but also in other media
formats: periodicals, serials, newspaper and magazine clippings,
exhibition announcements and catalogs, monographs, search
printouts and information on disk.  All these are of interest.  A
copy of the completed bibliography or the database on diskette
(Procite databases work equally well on Mac or IBM) to each
contributor along with some sort of documentation of the process
and a list of participants.

Submissions via mailways, telephone, or Bitnet/Internet/Well:

_Xb_
c/o Reed Altemus
email: IP25196@portland.maine.edu or
          raltemus@well.sf.ca.us
mail:  16 Blanchard Road
       Cumberland Ctr., Maine 04021-97 USA
phone: (207) 829-3666

20)--------------------------------------------------------------

Announcement and Call for Submissions

_POSTMODERN CULTURE_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor  *Joseph Natoli*
Editor         *Carola Sautter*

     We invite submissions of short manuscripts that present a
postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics
to Jeff Dahmer, Rap music to Columbus, the Presidential Campaign
to Rodney King--and academic discourses from art and literature
to politics and history, sociology and science to women's
studies, from computer studies to cultural studies.

     This series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-
be-completed North/South Superhighway to Truth and onto
postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low
culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business
and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs,"
formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse,
analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives,
truths and parodies of truths.

     By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that
has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to
link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and
events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them.
Modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes
postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the
difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and
diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

     Accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodern style"
that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic
spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist
and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple-
narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational."

Inquiries, proposals and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY  12246-0001

21)--------------------------------------------------------------

*********************************************************
HERMIT '93
An International Art Symposium
under the auspices of the Czech Ministry of Culture
1st June - 30th June, 1993
Plasy, Czechoslovakia
*********************************************************

     A Call for Sound Installations, Sculptors, and Fine Artists.

GROWTHRINGS:
time - place - rhythm - light - matter - energy
from Baroque till present.

The theme of the second international symposium-meeting-
exposition and workshop in the Ancient Cistercian monastery in
Plasy (West Bohemia) will be the stimulation of interrelations
between the seeing and hearing, between the past and the
present,between centrum and province, high and low, matter and
energy, between people and their cultural and natural
environment.

Artists, musicians, and intermedia artists from Czechoslovakia,
the Netherlands, Belgium, USA, Australia, Germany and Great
Britain too part in the first symposium HERMIT '92.  However,
while HERMIT '92 was mainly focused on artists from the CSFR,
Netherlands, and Belgium, this year's selection will be
multicultural.  Beside artists from Western and Eastern Europe,
fine artists and musicians from other continents and ethnic
cultures will be in attendance.

The installations, sound sculptures, and performances were mostly
realized directly in the complex of this former monastery founded
in 1142.  The convent contains many different spaces--from dark,
mysterious, subterranean cellars with underground water systems
to light chapels and huge corridors.  The ideal sonic conditions
of the interiors were used for many sound installations and music
performances.  The four floor interior of the granary, with its
early gothic King's chapel and old tower clock, are considered by
artists to be outstanding exhibition space for contemporary art.

The program will be divided into sections:

1) SOUND INSTALLATION AND MUSIC PERFORMANCES.

     The scope of musical styles and genres will range from
     interpretations of baroque music, to authentic folklore and
     experimental contemporary. This part of the symposium will
     consist of exhibition held in the convent, the large concert
     hall in the former refectory, the chapel of St. Benedict and
     of St. Bernard, and the corridors of the first floor of the
     granary (check on this).  Further, the work of some of the
     sound artists and musicians will be presented in workshops.

3) DISCUSSIONS:

     Theoretical issues will be formally raised in a series of
     lectures, discussions and workshops addressing different
     aspects of the Baroque tradition from the perspective of
     mondial fine art, architecture, music, philosophy, ecology,
     history, and the transformation of the Baroque heritage in
     modern society.  Discussions are open to the public.

Invited participants should send their proposals for HERMIT 2
with documentation at least three months prior to the beginning
of the Symposium.  Deadline is April 1, 1993.

The contribution fee is 150 DM.  The organizers of HERMIT 93 will
take care of accommodations for active participants.  The minimal
time spent in Plasy is 7 days, maximum is 2 months.

Contact:

          The HERMIT Foundation.

curators:  Jana Sykyrova
           The Monastery of Plasy,
           33101 PLASY,
           Bohemia.
           (tel)  0942-182-2174
           (fax)  0942-182-2198

           Milos Vojtechovsky
           Binnenbantammer Straat 15,
           1011 CH Amsterdam
           Holland
           (tel)  020-62575-69

22)--------------------------------------------------------------

Announcement and Call for Papers

*********************************
THE EXPERIENCE OF THEORY
Literary Symposium organized
by and for young scholars
*********************************

University of Gothenburg, Sweden
September 24-26, 1993

Defining THEORY is becoming increasingly difficult in the age of
postmodernism, where the impact of philosophical theory on
literary research during the 70s and 80s is now supplemented by
the demand for an orientation towards history, culture, science,
society and politics.

In a number of workshops, we propose to discuss THEORY AS
EXPERIENCE--as a process influencing our perception of literary,
critical, and scholarly activity.  How does theory, as
experience, enhance our understanding of the literary work?  In
what ways does theory enable us to experience art as becoming
rather that being, and, conversely, how does theory prevent us
from experiencing the text as something dynamic rather than
static?  The discussion of theory as experience opens new modes
of evaluating theory, thus in extension contributing to the
formation of a theory about theory.

We call for papers focusing on THE EXPERIENCE OF THEORY;
experience here may be the experience of studying, of teaching,
of researching, of theorizing, of reading, of writing, of
enjoying, etc..

We invite participants from Europe and the USA and expect to have
guest speakers from Scandinavia and Great Britain.

The registration fee of SEK 200 also covers all meals and
accommodations for those who accept to stay with a fellow
student.  On request we can undertake to send lists of hostels
and hotels.

Prospective participants are invited to contact us no later than
31st January, 1993; and submit papers by 31st March, 1993.

David Dickson       Claudia Egerer      Hans Werner

Mail:     University of Gothenburg
          Department of English
          The Experience of Theory
          S - 412 98  GOTHENBURG
          Sweden

E-mail:   egerer@eng.gu.se
          werner@eng.gu.se

Fax:      int+46 (0)31-773-47-26

23)--------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Work

*************************************************
MONTAGE 93:
International Festival of the Image
July 11 through August 7, 1993
*************************************************

Montage 93: International Festival of the Image, is inviting
independent producers to submit work for an exhibition of
electronic time-based media.  Work will be screened at Montage
93, July 11 through August 7, 1993.

Goals
The goals of Montage 93 are to celebrate the fusion of arts and
technology in contemporary image making and to explore the future
of the visual communications.  The International Video Etc.
Festival is seeking new electronic time-based work created by
independent producers worldwide.

Review Procedure
All work will be reviewed by a committee of curators,
programmers, and makers.  The committee will attempt to assemble
an exhibition that reflects the current state of the visual time-
based electronic arts.  Notification of acceptance or rejection
will be made by June 1, 1993.

Submission Guidelines:
Visual time-based electronic media including video, computer
graphics/animation, multimedia*, and hypermedia* are eligible.

* Work must be exhibitable as a single channel videotape.

All work must be submitted on videotape, in any of the following
NTSC formats:
3/4 UMatic, VHS, S-VHS, BETA, Video8, Hi8.
Maximum length of any title is 58 minutes.

Submission Procedures:
Each maker must include a resume.
Each title must be accompanied by a statement.
Each title must be accompanied by a copy of the Entry and Release
Form printed below.

Tapes mailed from within the United States will be returned only
if accompanied by a self addressed stamped envelope.  Tapes
mailed from outside the United States will be returned only if
accompanied by a self addressed envelope and an international
money order in U.S. dollars for the cost of return mail.

Tapes mailed from outside the United States should be marked:
"No commercial value.  Educational Material."

***Tapes must be received by May 1, 1993.

Send tapes, statement, resume, and Entry and Release Form
together to:

Montage 93: Video Etc. Festival
31 Prince Street
Rochester, NY, USA 14607-1499

Please note:
Do not send masters, originals, or irreplaceable materials.
Montage 93 will make every reasonable attempt to safeguard tapes,
but is not responsible for loss or damage.
Maker is responsible for any copyrighted material within the
title.

*****************************************************************

Video Etc.
Entry and Release Form

A copy of this form must accompany each title.  Please print or
type.

Name____________________________________________________________

Address_________________________________________________________

City____________________________________________________________

State_________________________________Zip/Postal Code___________

Country_________________________________________________________

Phone_________________FAX________________E-Mail_________________

Provide the following information for each title:

Title___________________________________________________________

Original, Medium, and Format____________________________________

Completion date_________________________________________________

Running time____________________________________________________

Format: (circle one)  Z3/4 UMatic  VHS  S-VHS  Beta  8mm   Hi 8

________________________________________________________________

Your signature authorizes Montage 93 to duplicate your work for
exhibition at Montage 93.

STATEMENT

___
___
___
___

This will be edited for use in program notes and/or a catalog.

24)--------------------------------------------------------------

Call For Papers
***********************************
1993 Annual Meeting of the Society
for Literature and Science
***********************************

Back Bay Hilton
Boston, MA
November 18-21, 1993

Theme: "Possible Worlds, Alternate Realities: Literature and
          Science as World-Making"

To include such topics as:

     *Rhetoric and Reality
     *Anthropological Discourse and the "Other"
     *Images and Visual Representation in Science and Technology
     *Technology, Embodiment, Knowledge
     *Constructing the Natural and the Artificial in Science,
          Technology, and Literature
     *Literary Strategies and the History of Science
     *Virtual Realities
     *The Representation of Nature and Science and the Rhetoric
          of Popular Culture and Film
     *Primitive and Postmodern
     *The Garden and the Wilderness
     *God and Nature
     *Illness Narratives and the Rhetoric of Biomedicine
     *Discovery and Colonization
     *Ecology and Politics
     *Orderly Disorder

Proposals must include:

     1.  Full names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses
          (if available)

     2.  Full titles and one-page abstracts for all papers

     3.  Titles/themes and name of coordinator for all seminars
          and special panels

Send abstracts for individual papers or proposals for seminars or
special panels to:

Alan Kibel
Literature Department
MIT
Cambridge, MA  02139

Due date for abstracts and proposals is March 1, 1993.

25)--------------------------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS

****************************

_Simulation and Gaming_
An International Journal of
Theory, Design and Research

****************************

_Simulation and Gaming_ (Sage Publications) is the world's
foremost journal devoted to academic and applied issues in the
fast expanding fields of simulation, computerized simulation,
gaming, modeling, play, role-play and active, experimental
learning and related methodologies in education, training and
research.

The broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of _Simulation &
Gaming_ is demonstrated by the variety of its readers and
contributors, as well as its Editorial Board members, such as
sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists and
educators, as well as experts in environmental issues,
international studies, management and business, policy and
planning, decision making and conflict resolution, cognition,
learning theory, communication, language learning, media,
educational technologies and computing.  Manuscripts are welcome
at any time.

Before submitting a manuscript, potential authors should write
for a copy of the Guide for Authors, enclosing a self-addressed,
sticky label and $2 in stamps (in USA only).

Write to:

David Crookall
Editor
S&G
Morgan Hall
Box 870244
U of AL
Tuscaloosa, AL  35487  USA

To subscribe:
Sage Publications
2455 Teller Road
Newbury Park, CA  91320  USA

Bonhill Street
London EC2A 4PU
UK

26)--------------------------------------------------------------

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Guest Editorships for Theme Issues of
_Simulation & Gaming_
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

From time to time a special theme issue of S&G is prepared by a
Guest Editor.  Special issues in preparation or that have already
appeared deal with business, debriefing, evaluation,
ethnomethodology, military gaming, cross-cultural communication,
and entrepreneurship.

In principle, any theme can be proposed for a special theme
issue, as long as it is important and of interest to a wide range
of readers.

If you would like to offer your services as a Guest Editor,
please send:
     - a one page proposal (justifying the theme, outlining the

       rational, identifying possible authors and sub-topics)

     - a short resume (one page)

     - notes on any previous editorial experience

     - name, address, telephone numbers and e-mail address(es)
          (the latter is essential)

to
     crookall@ua1vm.bitnet or
     crookall@ua1vm.ua.edu or
     David Crookall
     Editor S&G
     PO Box 870244
     University of Alabama
     Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 USA

Subscription inquiries about S&G should be directed to:

     Sage Publications
     PO Box 5084
     Newbury Park, CA 91359 USA
     tel: (805) 499-0721

27)--------------------------------------------------------------

VIDEO POSITIVE 93
The U.K.'s International festival of creative video and
electronic media art.

In 1993 VIDEO POSITIVE is back with the most substantial and
extraordinary program of electronic art ever seen in Britain.

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 presents several newly commissioned video
installations combined with the welcome restaging of some of the
best works from around the world.  This is complemented by
colorful local projects and an equally vigorous and significant
program of screenings, seminars, live art commissions and special
events.

Installation Program

The centerpiece of VIDEO POSITIVE 93 is an extensive installation
program held at Liverpool's premiere galleries (the Tate Gallery
Liverpool, the Bluecoat, Open Eye and Walker Galleries) and
several public sites across the city.

The international element involves the presentation of 15
installations, 8 of which are world premiers, from artists
including Lei Cox, Agnes Gegedud, Simon Robertshaw, Barbara
Steinman, Andrew Stones, Cathy Vogan and Richard Wright.
The Collaboration Program
This progressive and successful program continues to transform
Liverpool's public sites with works produced by local people
which are both incisive and popular.

Coordinated by video artist Louise Forshaw, the thriving
Collaboration Program has introduced several fresh initiatives in
1993.  The presentation of 8 installations and an exciting
screening program involves double the number of events compared
with previous years.

Screenings

Important European events of the early 90's provide the
inspiration for a program package which looks at issues of
British cultural identity within recent video art.

Other highlights have been programmed in conjunction with the
Film & Video Umbrella, London.  These include new and recent
computer graphics and animation Video works by Jean-Luc Godard,
Bill Viola, David Blair, The Wooster Group, The Collaboration
Program and contemporary programs of music and sound featuring
work by David Byrne.

Performances

Continuing Moviola's tradition of commissioning collaborations
which cross artforms, the festival presents a series of live art
projects which combine performance, music and new technologies.

Seminars

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 has created the ideal atmosphere for an
expressive and vibrant celebration of the contemporary artform of
electronic art.  The seminar program provides an outstanding
opportunity for critical discussion in an international context.

Topics for discussion in 1993 include gender and technology, the
experience of black artists working with video and new
technologies, the festival's Collaboration Program  and the
impact of science and engineering upon electronic media art and
design.

Special Events

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 also hosts a wide range of miscellaneous events
and activities including workshops with artists, displays of
state-of-the-art equipment and technology including  virtual
reality, workshops for curators, special launches, presentations
and the Festival Club.

Mailing and Information

For a free color brochure (available March, 1993) and information
about advance bookings, etc., write to:

MOVIOLA,
Bluecoat Chambers,
School Lane,
Liverpool L1 3BX,
U.K.
Tel (UK) 051-709-2663
Fax (UK) 051-707-2150

28)--------------------------------------------------------------

*****************************
NARRATIVE:
An International Conference
*****************************

April 1-4, 1993
Albany, NY

Sponsored by:  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and The Society
          for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Co-Sponsors:   Siena College and Russell Sage College

Affiliates:    Skidmore College, Union College, The College of
     Saint Rose, The State University of New York-Albany

Major Speakers:
               *Houston Baker, Jr.    University of Pennsylvania,
                                      Center for the Study of
                                      Black Literature and
                                                  Culture

               *Don Bialostosky         University of Toledo,
                                        English-Rhetoric

               *Thomas Laquer           Univ. of Calif-Berkeley,
                                        History

               *Carolyn Merchant        Univ. of Calif-Berkeley,
                                        Conservation and Resource
                                        Studies

               *Tania Modelski          Univ. of So. Calif,
                                        English-Film

The conference is an interdisciplinary forum to discuss all
aspects of narrative theory and practice.  Papers on narrative in
any genre, period, nationality, discipline, and media (film, art,
popular culture) will be considered.  The committee especially
welcomes topics involving inter-disciplinary methods or cross-
cultural perspectives.  The presentation should be in English and
the focus should be on narrative.

Submit papers (no more than 10 pgs. [2500 words]) or abstracts
(at least 500 words) and a short vita.  Proposals for panels of 3
or 4 papers are encouraged.  Panels of particular interest with
only 2 papers will also be considered.  Organizers should include
a statement on the focus of the panel; and papers or abstracts
for all participants.  Panel organizers may give a paper in the
session they propose.  We regret that we are unable to return
submissions.

Alan Nadel, Conference Coordinator
Department of Language, Literature, and Communication
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY  12180

29)--------------------------------------------------------------

_ORTRAD-L_

ORTRAD-L seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum for open
discussion and exchange of resources in the general field of
studies in oral tradition.  All those interested in the world's
living oral traditions (e.g., African, Hispanic, Native American,
etc.) or in texts with roots in oral tradition (e.g., the Old and
New Testaments, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf,
etc.) are invited to join the conversation.  This list should be
useful for specialists in language and literature, folklore,
anthropology, history, and other areas.

To subscribe, send the following command to

LISTSERV@MIZZOU1.BITNET or LISTSERV@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU:

SUB ORTRAD-L your _full_ name

Submissions to the list should be sent to:

ORTRAD-L@MIZZOU1.BITNET or ORTRAD-L@MISSOURI.EDU

Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
              301 Read Hall
              University of Missouri
              Columbia, MO 65211
              Tel (314) 822-9720
30)-------------------------------------------------------------

_SEMIOS-L_

A new electronic discussion group has been formed for those
interested in semiotics, visual language, graphic design and
advertising, deconstruction, the philosophy of language, and
others curious about the process of communication.  The core
issue that ties all of these disciplines together is the
production and interpretation of signs.

To become a part of _SEMIOS-L_, send the following command from
your computer:

From a Bitnet loation:
TELL LISTSERV AT ULKYVM SUBSCRIBE SEMIOS-L (Your Name)

From an Internet site:
To: Listserv%ULKYVM.Louisville.edu Subscribe SEMIOS-L (Your Name)

In the first two weeks of operation, _SEMIOS-L_ already had over
one hundred members from four continents.  The group welcomes new
voices.

Steven Skaggs
SEMIOS-L List Manager

31)--------------------------------------------------------------

SOCHIST on LISTSERV@USCVM
New Social History List or LISTSERV@VM.USC.EDU

Briefly, this list will address three aspects of what is called
the "New Social History":

1)  Emphasis on quantative data rather that an analysis of prose
     sources.

2)  Borrowing of methodologies from the social sciences, such as
     linguistics, demographics, anthropology, etc..

3)  The examination of groups which have been ignored by
     traditional disciplines (i.e. the history of women,
     families, children, labor, etc.).

To subscribe, send e-mail to:

LISTSERV@SCVM.BITNET or listserv@vm.usc.edu

with the single line in the BODY of the e-mail:
SUBSCRIBE SOCHIST your full name.

32)--------------------------------------------------------------

_Interdis_

Welcome to the INTERDIS e-mail discussion list.  The idea behind
this list is to facilitate national (and international)
discussions of issues of interest to people working and teaching
in interdisciplinary contexts.  It is my hope that the list will
be a source of lively, thought provoking discussion of issues
relating to integrating perspectives and pedagogical issues
associated with interdisciplinary work.  It should also be a good
place to discuss papers, books, films, and exercises from
interdisciplinary perspectives.  Please forward this message to
colleagues you think may be interested in the list.  They can put
themselves on the list automatically by sending e-mail to:

LISTSERV@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
The message should read SUB INTERDIS 

To post comments to the list, e-mail
INTERDIS@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU

Feel free to begin posting comments today.  I look forward to our
continuing dialogue.

September 25, 2013

Selected Letters From Readers

RE: Foley’s Review of Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. An Exchange between Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau and Michael W. Foley.

Dear PMC,

In a post-modern frame of reference one authors a book and then sets it free to be interpreted by various readers each in his or her own way. Criticism is central to a post-modernism and its pluralism of readings. If you can’t take criticism, or if you don’t wish to defend your ideas, better not present them in the public realm. And this is the problem with Prof. Foley’s review. It isn’t about ideas. It is a series of unsubstantiated insults and mis-information.

Foley’s review does not present a post-modern reading of my book. Neither is he inspired by deconstruction. His review is modern in the worse sense–a singular and unexciting “reading.” It announces that my text is a “repudiation” of post-modernism, assumes his is the only interpretation possible, and implicitly denies the legitimacy of other views. Post-modernism and the Social Sciences has been well received by some post-modernists and criticized by others. It has attracted attention not only in the social sciences but in the humanities as well. It even made it to the stage recently as the Doug Elkins Dance Company (New York) incorporated readings from it into their post-modern repertoire for the International Festival of New Dance, Montreal, November 1992.

Prof. Foley senses my own ambivalence about post-modernism. I make no claim to be a post-modernist but I did attempt to be fair in writing about it. I made every effort to document my conclusions about post-modernism, to indicate where readers could find more information. Of course I did not shy away from criticism of it. But at the same time I had no axe to grind. Nor did I feel the need to defend post-modernism. Perhaps this is why I made no effort to “eliminate” certain post-modern currents from it or, for example, to deny Derrida’s defense of Paul deMan’s early Nazi affiliations. It is not I, but Foley, who puts Derrida in bed with Ayatollah Khomeini! (REVIEW-2.592, par. 5). In a similar fashion on a number of occasions Foley takes the questions I pose for post-modern inquiry and answers for me, only to then turn around, attribute his constructions to me, and criticize his own self-fabricated answers (paragraph 6). Some post-modernists call for the death of the author and elevate the reader but in this instance Prof. Foley’s “interpretation” diminishes his status as reader, not to mention reviewer. Is this a “post-post-modern turn” where the review re-writes the text and then reviews his own creation?

Foley argues that there is nothing much new offered by post-modernism. I would not disagree. Chapter 1 section 1 of my book entitled “Post-Modern Lineage: Some Intellectual Precursors” makes his case. But he missed this and even misinterpreted the section on structuralists altogether. I argue that post-modernism is a collage of many intellectual and philosophical currents. But at the same time, it constitutes a new form of challenge in that it refuses to set up a new paradigm to replace those it deconstructs.

I am bothered by the absence of any depth to this review–brief, one-line dismissals signal an inability to take my book seriously. Foley says I am a “positivist.” He suggests that I “play on conflicts within postmodernism without illuminating them, or ever giving an adequate account of them.” This is insulting and unfair. By their very nature these criticisms are so broad and sweeping that they cannot be contradicted. I wonder, if I agreed with Prof. Foley’s own views would my analysis be “illuminating” and “adequate,” uncorrupted by “positivism.”

Finally, when I discuss the feminist debate around post-modernism, Prof. Foley admonishes that I could have “equally well” referred to the “new social history or the Annales School.” At this point Foley moves beyond criticism to what I view as pure paternalism, lecturing me as to what I should have written about, whom I should have cited. I believe that feminists have raised some qualitatively different and extremely important questions for post-modernists. In fact, I do discuss both the new history and the Annales School in Chapter 4.

I read Prof. Foley as an angry, unhappy and disappointed man (admittedly my construct). He is angry at me, unhappy with post-modernism, disappointed with Princeton University Press. He suggests that Princeton University Press abandoned standards of judgment in publishing my book. Yes, Princeton did publish my book. Yes, the book has done very well. And yes, it was submitted to the same high standards of evaluation as every other book Princeton publishes. But by focusing on this peripheral issue Foley avoids what is essential–ideas, analysis, substance. And this is really regrettable. There is so much to say about post-modernism and the exciting intellectual issues it raises.

Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau
Political Science Dept.
University of Quebec–Montreal

Dear PMC,

For those who missed the evidence in the stylistic pyro-technics of Baudrillard and Derrida, Professor Vaillancourt-Rosenau’s outraged response to my review of her _Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences_ attests that there is still life in the authorial persona. But I have never doubted that, postmodernism notwithstanding. What I did dare doubt was the usefulness of Vaillancourt-Rosenau’s account. Her letter scarcely changes my mind; indeed, her multiple mis-readings of my text serve only to reinforce my doubts about her readings of others. (No, I am not angry, Prof. Vaillancourt-Rosenau, nor did I accuse you of being a positivist!)

I have no wish to deny Vaillancourt-Rosenau her intemperate response to my review, not to mention her favorable reviews in other quarters or, for that matter, her royalties. I find it hard to begrudge academics our modest successes. And Vaillancourt-Rosenau is, after all, right about two things: I found her book immensely disappointing, and I have serious misgivings about some of the more extravagant claims of the theorists of postmodernism. The former was not, indeed, a “substantive” complaint; it was practical and formal. It may be summarized in two points: First, in the welter of citations and snippets of proof-texts, the reader finds virtually no sustained analysis of any one figure, so that it would be difficult to tell, for example, that Foucault’s “archaeologies” of prison and asylum, not to mention his later explorations of language and power, have been seminal to the on-going reexamination in social science and philosophy of the social construction of the human world. Second, Vaillancourt- Rosenau regularly blurs the useful distinction between theorists of postmodernism and representatives of postmodern culture. With the world of postmodernism divided into “skeptics” and “affirmatives,” it was my mistake, I must confess, to find Islamic fundamentalism (a “Third World affirmative post-modernism,” p. 143) in the same bed with Derrida (a “skeptic”). Perhaps I should have chosen Foucault, except that he is labeled a “skeptic”in one place (p. 42) and an “affirmative” in another (p. 50). In the topsy-turvy postmodern world, even Prof. Rosenau’s classificatory ardor is defeated occasionally.

In short, for these and other reasons enumerated in the review, I found the book a less than useful guide to both postmodernism and contemporary concerns in the social sciences; in the last few paragraphs I attempted to suggest directions for further inquiry. The issues raised were substantive and worth reiterating. “Postmodernism” is no doubt a protean term, conjuring up a variety of disparate phenomena, depending on the context. Its theorists make prodigious claims, not all of them either unique or credible. In the context of the social sciences, however, postmodernist theories converge with both older and newer theoretical traditions, reinforcing recent explorations of, for example, popular culture and resistance; the dubious and shifting discursive foundations of the modern state system; metaphor, metonymy, and analogy in social scientific doctrine, historiography, and popular political and economic discourse; and the devious twists and turns of patriarchy. There are undoubtedly tensions as well, some of them touched upon by Vaillancourt-Rosenau. Certain postmodernist claims about the disappearance of the “subject” in particular, while they sit quite well with an older social scientific tradition (best represented today, ironically enough, in quantitative, “positivist” approaches), seem to clash with the return to human agents and their “subjectivities” in newer, more process-oriented research in comparative politics and international relations, with recent explorations of the “structure-agent problem,” and with the widespread adoption of “rational choice” models in political science and sociology.

There are thus very important issues to occupy us in the encounter of postmodernism, postmodernist theory, and the social sciences, as Vaillancourt-Rosenau insists. My complaint was and is that they have not been well raised by the book in question. Of this, of course, the interested reader must be the last judge. A reviewer should indeed engage ideas, where possible; and I have tried to do so. But I am enough of a modern to feel a similar obligation, where necessary, to offer the modest warning: Caveat emptor!

Michael W. Foley
Department of Politics
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C. 20064
foley@cua.edu

September 25, 2013
Baptismal Eulogies: Reconstructing Deconstruction From The Ashes

Glen Scott Allen

English Department
Towson State University
e7e4all@toe.towson.edu

Derrida, Jacques. Cinders. Tr. Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

I. Burials Past & Faster

“The true wretchedness . . . is particular, not diffuse.”¹ So begins Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” one of many Poe tales which has found its way to the movie screen as a British Hammer production, becoming in the transition all lurid technicolor drapes and heaving white bosoms. Of course, the movie version defers the prematurity of the burial as long as possible and finds its climax–as we knew it would–in the crypt with the heroine reacting in hyperbolic horror to the “true wretchedness” of her premature burial. The premature burial.

Or so the film version would have it. One irony (among so many) of the film’s misreading of the story is the slavish attention paid to that little word “The.” Poe’s story in fact begins with accounts of several premature burials, the better to establish ethos for the premise of his story, to grant it “verisimilitude,” (to mix Russian with American horror). Poe knows that, by supplying various examples, the particular will become credible; will even, through the sleight-of-hand of logic, become the exemplar of those examples. The premature burial–the exemplary, or “standard” premature burial.

And yet Poe realized that, while the logos of his story might rest on the general structure of inductive reasoning, its “single effect”–that which Poe believed defined a successful short story–resided not in the conceptual accumulation of generalized (as in “made vague”) instances, but rather in the specific image of the narrator–“man the unit”–undergoing the individualized tortures of being buried alive. These seemingly opposite requirements–that an example be representative, yet somehow unique–are what we might term the paradox of exemplarity. More about this paradox in the section on Derrida’s Cinders.

But in fact the greatest irony of Hammer’s “adaptation” of Poe’s story is that in “The Premature Burial” there is no the premature burial at all; the narrator misreads the signs of temporary confinement for those of eternal interment. And in much the same fashion, the Academy in general (as in “widely but not completely”) have misread–with a haste usually reserved for cholera victims–the “signs” of the death of deconstruction and the interment of Derridean criticism.

In fact, the stampede to denounce deconstruction has been so precipitous as to trample on the venerable traditions of mourning; and this, in a profession where Tradition is the constant specter, the incorruptible monument. The “mourners” at deconstruction’s graveside have skipped right over the Eulogy and proceeded, with undisguised glee, to the Obloquy–the stage of hypercriticism which would normally follow burial by a respectable period of reassessment; a stage generally (as in “popularly”) arrived at gradually, reluctantly and sincerely.

Emeritus Yalie C. Van Woodward blithely writes of deconstruction’s “brief and tormented” history.² Jonathan Yardley suggests, to everyone who will publish, that deconstruction has breathed its “last gasp.” And in a viciously enthusiastic (and woefully inaccurate) article supposedly “debunking” deconstruction, poet David Lehman argues from the premise that “the fortunes of deconstruction as an academic phalanx have declined,” using as spokesmodels everyone from Robert “Iron Man” Bly to “former” deconstructionist Barbara Johnson.³

While it may seem shooting ducks in a barrel to attack the rusty dreadnaughts of Old Criticism like Woodward and Yardley (and Lehman), in fact the ranks of crocodile mourners are not limited to these scholastic neo-conservatives; they simply gloat the loudest.

After all, “ex” deconstructionist Barbara Johnson did indeed give a talk entitled “The Wake of Deconstruction” at last summer’s School of Theory and Criticism at Dartmouth College. Recent editorials in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the MLA Newsletter speak of deconstruction in the assured past tense. And, however thoroughly the word “deconstruction” is disseminated in the academic and even public discourse, the Yale School rarely uses the “D-word” anymore.⁴ Even those in favor of a reconstruction of deconstruction have accepted that, as Jeffrey Nealon writes in a recent and extremely useful essay in PMLA, “Deconstruction . . . is dead in literature departments today.”⁵

Is deconstruction dead and buried? Or merely buried?

In Poe’s story, the examples of premature burials turn on the living too soon surrendering their responsibility for the (apparently) dead, as they consistently and curiously resist all efforts at scrutiny or autopsy. In its social and historical context, “The Premature Burial” might be seen as representing a general (as in recognizable but not necessarily locatable) anxiety of mid-19th century America over the increasingly indistinct boundary between the irrelevant and ritualistic requirements of the past and the insistent and material demands of the present.⁶ Thus the narrator of Poe’s story searches for the reliable sign of death and the dependable limit of indebtedness; a sign and a limit that will provide a specific, quantifiable answer to the question, When exactly might the past be memorialized, and thus forgotten?

Derrida’s Cinders (1991) and The Other Heading (1992) directly engage this question by separating it into two questions; questions which are perhaps the two most important problems of the emerging 21st century: How do we both “acknowledge” indebtedness to the past and yet free ourselves from its icy clasp? And how do we “negotiate” the seemingly mutually exclusive demands of pluralism and social cohesion?

Derrida frames these questions as the paradox of the past, and the paradox of the example.⁷

II. Elegiac Cinders

The importance of acknowledging the past is everywhere present in Derrida’s works. In many ways, Cinders is an “exhibition” of Derrida’s ideas about the elusive mechanism of meaning and its relationship to the past. And like an exhibition, one senses throughout the presence of his past influences and works.

The title Cinders is a simplification of the untranslatable feu la cendre⁸. The book deals with a “specter” which has haunted Derrida for nearly a decade, this “specter” being the phrase il y a la cendre: “cinders there are”–with an accent grave over the ‘a’ of la, thus doubling the sense in which the word means “there”; a phrase which appears first in La Dissemination, and recurs in partial and various incarnations in many of his other works since, most notably the “Envois” section of The Post Card. And ghosts of other prior works enter as the refrain of remembrance (il y a la cendre) weaves its way through a text which is structurally reminiscent of Glas (1974).

On the left hand side of the page are short quotes from earlier works, passages which bear in one way or another on the idea of cinders, burning, residue, invisible remainders. Derrida titles these notes “Animadversions” (observations), both to capture their nature as brief musings, and to acknowledge the French avant garde journal Anima, a forum for the exploration of language which is, appropriately, no more. The animadversions are there to suggest (as in “fanning an ember”) reverberations to the text on the right hand side of the page, which is a “philosophical prose poem” about, around, within the paradox of antecedents, debts; expressions as constant eulogy, incomplete epitaph, dysfunctional nostalgia–all in search of “she,” the cinder.

While some critics might see in this exhibition a “repetition” of favorite Derridean themes, this retrospective approach is most appropriate here. There is a certain melancholic undertone to Cinders; the sort of melancholy resident in works which eulogize the end of one period and inaugurate the beginning of another.

And thus, as Ned Lukacher points out in an often brilliant introduction “Morning Becomes Telepathy,” Cinders is anything but old wine in new bottles. Lukacher grapples with the meaning of the word “cinder” and the phrase il y a la cendre in an “overview” of Derridean sources, influences and concerns. For instance, he brings Hegel’s notion of the Klang, “the ‘Ringing’ at the origin of language” into the discussion, and suggests a connection between this primeval trace as sound for Hegel, and later as “spirit” (Geist) or “flame” for Heidegger. Thus cinders become what is left after a holocaust–“Pure and figureless, this light burns all. It burns itself in the all-burning [le brule-tout]” (42). An all-burning which leaves nothing; nothing, perhaps, but an “oscillation”: “It is the heat within the resonance of this oscillation that Derrida names la cendre” (3).

Cinder is, too, the latest in a long line of terms–trace, differance, trail–with which Derrida has struggled to name “these remains without remainder.” Lukacher suggests an analogy with quarks: “Cinders are the quarks of language, neither proper names nor metaphors” (1).

While Lukacher suggests that quarks keep “a space open into which the truth, or its impossibility, might come,” it is more appropriate to metaphorize them as the the illogical logic of metaphor itself; as that “leap” of human imagination which creates similarities out of distances. Quarks are indivisible from the particles which they “make up.” That is to say, they exist only as the relationship of intersecting energy and matter which appears to us as those particles. They are all event, no structure. Thus cinders are quarks in the sense the term indicates a “site” of meaning which is non-local and a “duration” of meaning which is without origin or end.

Cinders are there; there are cinders. “There” is both assertion of location and of existence. Of location as existence. The ‘a’ (accent grave) of the “there” which “locates” the cinder is also meant to “suggest a feminine register” to the voice of the text, as well as to indicate that the word is not transparent, that it “burns” with the “incineration of the indefinite article.”

The phrase, the word, the text all “burn” also with a plurality of voices. Heidegger particularly haunts these pages. Heidegger “emphasize[d] the delicate nature of the relation between language and truth; between figure and idea, between . . . Dichten (to write) . . . and Denken (to think)” (2)–acts which Lukacher writes are “held apart by a delicate yet luminous difference.” Heidegger referred to this difference as a “rift (Riss),” something like (and unlike, of course) the gap “between” the two components of a metaphor. This “holding itself is a relation,” that is to say, an event borne of, but not resident in the functioning of difference, the mechanics of signification.

This relation is a tension, and this tension is as close as we can perhaps get to “placing” meaning–just as a flame is as close as we get to associating a “thereness” with pure energy. Put in terms of the binary models we must leave behind: meaning is neither something “fissioned” by the breaking up of the metaphysical dichotomy, nor “fused” through the synthesis of the dialectic. The tension, the relation, the residue itself is the event of meaning: elastic, non-local, always uncertain–but always present.

The prose poem section of Cinders is as difficult to “decipher” as anything Derrida has written: personal, self-referential, elusive, allusive, fragile. Everything, that is, which describes the cinders which there are. But it is also as rewarding as any of his other works. In combination with the distinctly different Derridean text The Other Heading, and recent articles urging a reconstruction of Derridean analysis, perhaps the “death” of deconstruction can be exposed as greatly exaggerated.

For instance, Nealon argues in the PMLA that most of the current attacks on deconstruction–in fact much of the anti-deconstruction criticism of the last twenty years–has in fact been based on mis-readings of Derridean thought; misreadings circulated and codified by his earliest American translators. While I won’t rehearse Nealon’s argument in its entirety here, it is central enough to my discussion of the importance of these two works to refer to at some length.

Nealon begins by observing that deconstruction’s critics have typically charged its practitioners with “simply denying meaning or interpretation by showing how oppositions . . . cancel themselves out” (emphasis added). Along with this charge come the ancillary criticisms that it is apolitical, ahistorical, acontextual, and amoral. But it should be clear that the primary charge–that it seeks neutrality–governs all the others, whether the neutrality claimed is historical or moral. And thus at the root of most anti-deconstructive rhetoric is the indictment that it is inherently nihilistic. Anyone who thinks such an attack comically overheated need look no further than David Lehman’s essay.

While Lehman begins quite typically by claiming that the major fault of deconstructive criticism is “those binary reversals that come as second nature to the initiates of the mysteries of deconstruction,” his argument soon begins leaping from deconstruction to Derrida to de Man to conformity to Nazis, as though all of these topics were quite obviously connected at the conceptual hip. “After the de Man affair, deconstruction will never again be a harmless thrilling thing–we have seen how it can be used to fudge facts, obfuscate truths, distort and mislead” (5). Lehman grandly, and ominously concludes that “the political system most consonant with deconstructive principles is authoritarian” (4).

Perhaps the problem of Lehman and neo-conservative critics like him is most grave, at least within the academy, because this strain of “thought” is within the academy–a tenacious moral smugness that is more dangerous than outright conservatism because it presents itself as a “new” humanism. While Lehman “concede[s] that some of the tactics and procedures of deconstruction, if used judiciously, may lead to fruitful ends” (if used judiciously? Fruitful ends?) still he is quick to warn of “[t]he marked absence of moral seriousness” in deconstructive criticism (8).

Perhaps that phrase “moral seriousness” reveals the heart of Lehman’s resentment toward Derrida. There has always been a sense of play about Derrida’s writing which seems to frustrate and infuriate die-hard formalists who believe criticism can only be worth reading if it is “serious,” i.e., hermeneutically sealed.

But Lehman’s prescription rings of the rhetoric of chapels, not classrooms. David Lehman and his familiars seem academic Cotton Mathers, ready to divide critics into the preterite and the damned, using as their standard the presence or absence of “moral seriousness.” (Never was a phrase more ripe for the very sort of “authoritarian” manipulation that Lehman ironically claims resides in Derridean analysis.) Of course, there is an important distinction to be made between neo-conservative critics of deconstruction like Woodward and Lehman, and those critics who engage Derrida and deconstruction on more “constructive” grounds.⁹

Still, the root charge leveled at Derrida’s work specifically and deconstruction generally (as in a concept if not a body of criticism) most often stems from that word “neutrality” and the echoes of nihilism it summons up.

III. Digging the Neutral Grave

Again, Lehman is a useful representative of this fundamental misreading, arguing that, as “deconstructionists frequently collapse the difference between a thing and its opposite” then what deconstruction produces is “the absence of difference” (1).¹⁰

Of course, the word “neutralization” was indeed used by Derrida in describing the “reversal” of dichotomies which often begins the deconstructive reading. However, what was often overlooked in the early translations was what followed: “To remain content with this reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to be destroyed.” More importantly, “to sit back . . . and take an attitude of neutralizing indifference with respect to the classical oppositions would be to give free rein to the existing forces that effectively and historically dominate the field” Dissemination 6; emphasis added). And even when American disseminators of Derridean concepts remarked on the importance of this second step, they seemed at a loss to explain what it meant.¹¹

Yet, while some critics working toward a reconstruction of Derridean analysis have made this observation, still very few (Judith Butler comes to mind as one recent exception)¹² have paid sufficient attention to revisioning that term “neutralization.” For example, Nealon himself doesn’t seem to realize that what Derrida meant by “neutralization” is quite significantly different than what he and nearly every American interpreter has meant by the word.

While Nealon differentiates between Derrida’s concept of “undecidability” and de Man’s of “unreadability,” still he quotes the de Manian notion that “A text . . . can literally be called ‘unreadable’ in that it leads to a set of assertions that radically exclude each other,” and then claims that “this definition would, of course, hold for Derrida also” (1272). I believe this to be a key, and again typical error, in that, for Derrida, a text is never unreadable. For instance, Derrida states in “Positions” that “the play of differences involves syntheses and referrals that prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element that is present in and of itself and refers only to itself” (38). And by “itself” he would include, no doubt, the “singular” element of unreadability. Again, the whole notion of “unreadable” or “utterly absent” or “paralyzed” meaning–all terms which de Man used as synonyms for the result of the “neutralization” of oppositions–is simply too reductionist, too rooted in concepts of “particular” meaning; concepts which Derrida works everywhere to deconstruct.

Perhaps the problem here is analogical. The image typically summoned by the term “neutralization” is a maneuver which brings together a particular meaning and its antithesis in a violent collision, resulting in an “annihilation” of meaning. Deconstruction thus becomes the antithesis of interpretation, and deconstructive readings are seen as leaving smoldering holes in a text. But there is all the differance in the world between Derrida’s enriching “undecidability” and de Man’s constricting “unreadability.” And there is every indication in Derridean thought that the “neutralization” of binarisms results not in annihilation, but rather in a state of continual engagement.

In the “turn of dominance” which has been an analytical tool since Nietzsche, the binary poles must first be shown to be, in the traditional discourse, decidedly unequal in “valence.” Thus the genealogical revision (more than reversion) of the terms is an absolutely necessary step in shaking the terms loose from their accumulated cultural denotations; especially, for Derrida, as those denotations grant a greater “moral authority” to one term than the other. And of course the term Derrida came to use for this moral authority was “presence.”¹³

But Derrida has always asked us to imagine instead that meaning is not “particular”; that it does not reside in “positive and negative” terms, but rather that it is inextricably resident within the tension between terms, between competing cultural forces which always tug towards interpretations of the coupled terms that validate their particular social and historical agenda.¹⁴ Thus Derrida’s first move is to “overturn” the struggle by demonstrating how each “side’s” definition of the term is utterly inscribed in the other “side’s” definition. However, even after this first act of revision the two forces are both still engaged–the term’s meaning is still a result of a tension, but what is now a revised tension, a tension freed of “moral authority” based on presence and ideality. Thus the “meaning” of any such coupling is a product of (at least) two competing cultural agencies, and not some “thing” resident in any particular site. Again, what Derrida is working so diligently toward is an understanding of meaning as event rather than structure.¹⁵

Even more importantly, for Derrida meaning never doesn’t exist–not at any moment of the deconstructive process. Meaning is elusive, mobile, inevitably non-local–but it is not something which can be annihilated, rendered somehow irrelevant. Thus Derridean deconstruction is consistently and fundamentally anti-nihilistic.

But what of American deconstruction? Is “continental” deconstruction the “pure” form, and our American brand a flawed import?

I am not suggesting we draw up a list of “good” and “bad” deconstructors, nor that we should use the Atlantic Ocean as a gulf separating “true” from “false” deconstruction. However, some forms of criticism which come under the general heading of “deconstruction” seem in fact only tenuously connected to Derrida’s ideas and techniques.

For instance, de Man’s “unreadable” reductions of texts work in a direction quite different from Derrida’s “undecidable” explorations. While de Man is primarily interested in rhetorical “impasses” which render interpretation stalemated, Derrida concentrates instead on mythologies of origin and closure, on those places in any text which “ground” its axioms and conclusions; not as an exercise in “neutralizing” such myths, but rather in an effort to expose and explore their rich semiotic associations. Thus what Derrida has been doing from Of Grammatology on is not comprehensible in any analysis which equates the two practices.

Furthermore, the “manner” of American deconstruction disseminated by Culler, de Man et al is a theory and practice in and of itself, with certain–though perhaps less certain than has been thought–connections to Derrida’s work. But it cannot be taken as an entirely accurate or fundamentally thorough translation of Derrida’s ideas. Thus any criticism of deconstruction as institutionalized by the early writers–and even many to follow–must be treated as criticism of their goals and methodologies, not Derrida’s.

This raises a question: Why hasn’t Derrida distanced himself and his work from these “incomplete” representations?

This is a question Nealon deals with in his essay. He points out that Derrida has always been unwilling to criticize–even in the smallest particular–any of his American “disseminators,” and that he has consistently displayed very little interest in “disciplining” the discourse surrounding his work.

Unless, that is, we can read the insistence in Cinders on reviewing “snapshot” expressions from his past works as an indirect form of protest; protest as restatement; restatement as remembrance. “Cinders are not nothing” (emphasis added). And the something that they are is an intersection of indebtedness to the past–“She, this cinder, was given or lent to him by so many others, through so much forgetting. . .” (41)–and promise for the future, “because each time it gives a different reading, another gift” (25). This hardly sounds like nihilism.

Perhaps Cinders is the first postmodern epistolary romance novel, written to (‘a’ accent grave) his love, Cinder, she–“Who is Cinder? Where is she? . . . someone vanished but something preserved her trace” (33)–complete with a Gothic preoccupation with the grave, the past, the thwarted romantic gesture. Perhaps there is even represented here an “anxiety of affluence,” a nervousness in the presence of so much meaning, an overabundance of meaning which can never be completely exhausted or entirely forgotten.

IV. Baptizing the Other Heading

Deconstruction’s burial is not only premature, it is also crowded; for the new right of the academy represent only a fraction of the new right in American society; a cultural faction whose attack rests, like Lehman’s, on the thuggish and irrational “logic” of guilt by association. The parties which are lumped together as “targets of opportunity” include deconstruction, the Humanities, universities, the MLA, feminism, multiculturalism, and, of course, “political correctness.”

For instance, their polysyllabic frontman George Will wrote recently in Newsweek that the Modern Language Association was a “more dangerous threat to the United States than the Butcher of Baghdad.” An editorial in the Chicago Tribune (October 1991) warned against the deadly and contagious affliction called “deconstruction, a French disease.” Another editorial, this one in the Wall Street Journal called upon all good Americans to beware “the fever swamps like the Modern Language Association . . . [where] Brigades of the politically correct” plot the downfall of Western Civilization. Syndicated columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell opines that the MLA stands for “intolerance and bigotry . . . [which] rides across campuses enforcing right thinking, thinking that is PC”.¹⁶

This widespread and virulently reactionary strike in the public and the academic press is expressive of deeply ingrained cultural resistance, even panic in the face of rising voices which were once faint or completely muted. And this cultural crisis–this crisis of cultures–is the context for Derrida’s first semi-explicit political writings collected in The Other Heading, a book which explores the paradox of examples.

The Other Heading includes an introduction (“For Example”) and two sections: the first from a paper Derrida delivered in Turin on May 20, 1990, at a conference entitled “European Cultural Identity,” and the second from a brief interview entitled “Call it a Day for Democracy.”

Here, Derrida is less interested in analyzing the “current” situation in Europe than analyzing the logic “of discourses that assume a certain relationship to the particular and the example” of “Europe and its historical others” (xi). This is meta-commentary, as always. However, though the larger concerns are the same, Derrida’s voice here is somewhat different: more relaxed, slightly less excruciatingly scholastic. But it is by no means political writing in the usual sense.

Derrida always writes in response to a prior text. In this case, that text is a collection of essays by Paul Valery, written for the League of Nations in the 1930s. Derrida begins were Valery began, speaking of the Europe of 1939 as a “Young Europe” which had been “constructed through a succession of exclusions, annexations, and exterminations.” And an odd sense of temporal displacement is further present as, when Derrida delivered this speech, the unification of Germany was only “in sight.” And yet everywhere is emphasized this very probability with his constant use of the qualifier “today”: “There is today the same feeling of imminence, of hope and danger, of anxiety” (63).

What Derrida seeks to begin here is an examination of the New European Subject; the post-colonial, post-cold war, post-unification, post-utopian, post-historical, post-modern subject; a subject immersed in demands for diversity, while still under tremendous pressure from the needs of cohesion.

Valery wrote his essays (Regards sur le monde actuel and Essais quasi politiques, among others) as a member of the Committee on Arts & Letters of the League of Nations, a committee whose ambitious charter called upon it to serve as a “permanent colloquium on ‘European cultural identity’” (xxxiv). Valery believed that the “best example” of a “site” of cohesive cultural identity was “that of the Mediterranean basin,” the “heart” of a New Europe which might serve as an “example” to the rest Europe, to the rest of the world.

Derrida sees in Valery’s use of this example all the trademarks of exemplary reasoning, as “the ‘example’ that it ‘offered’ [was] in fact unique, exemplary and incomparable” (xxv).

And here lies the rub. The word “example” is from the Latin, exemplum for “that which is taken out [emphasis added] of a larger quantity to show the character or quality of the rest.” An example is a “specimen,” something which is either “worthy of imitation” or that “serves as a warning.” An example is a “precedent,” a “prototype,” a “standard.”

But if the example is “taken out” of the context which forms it, is made to stand to one side, apart or above its companions, how, then, is it any longer an “example”? And if it is representative, how does it become “exemplary”?

The word which best captures the paradoxical logic of the example is, for Derrida, capital, in both the economic and political sense. Of course there is play here with cap (French for ‘head’) and capital, head and heading. But the relationships go much deeper than mere glyphic similarity. Such word play works to expose the substrata beneath centuries of assumptions which produce what we “mean” by a capital city, by the head of state, etc. “Europe has always recognized itself as a cape of headland . . . the point of departure for discovery, invention, and colonization, . . . or the very center, the Europe of the middle” (41).

For Valery–as for nearly everyone else who writes in favor of this or that “example” of cultural identity, an example which ought to serve as a “standard”–cultural identity becomes what Naas in his introduction calls “the metaphorization of literal goods and capital into the surplus value, the capital value, of spirit” (5). And Derrida argues that employing this metaphorization, capitalizing on the cultural example becomes “the very teleos of capital, the overcoming of the merely material in a spiritual surplus” (41).

To an American ear, the echoes of Puritanism are clearly audible in any argument of identity and “progress” which seeks the “overcoming of the merely material”; which sees as the highest good cultural investment which achieves “spiritual surplus.” And in fact what Valery argued was the best “example” for European cultural identity in 1939 sounds strikingly similar to what the critics of the MLA et al–what we might refer to as neo-Puritans–argue should be the best “example” for American cultural identity in the 1990s, and on into the 21st century.

While the “Other” heading–or as Derrida often insists on revising the phrase, the heading of the other–refers in Derrida’s speech to those “others” which have served as a colonial mirror to “central” Europe, to the Europe of Empires and Capitals, the “other” shore might just as well refer to the New World, facing the Old in temporal, geographic, and cultural descent/dependence/ independence. The similarity is more than merely situational, or even rhetorical–for the metaphor most often employed in the New Right’s attack on multiculturalism is this very idea of cultural capital.

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “The MLA on Trial”: “The assault on the profession for betraying the classics is itself a betrayal of the classics. It is an attempt to make them over into dull, safe, and routine celebrations of order, an attempt, that is, to transform them into a certain kind of cultural capital: safe investment, locked away in a vault” (40).

Drawing on this idea of cultural identity as “invested capital,” Derrida warns that the constant danger of any assertion of a singular national identity is that it “presents itself, claims itself.” That is, merely by stating itself, it argues for its validity, its history, its “investment” in the capital of culture, and therefore its claim to future benefits. As Derrida warns, “it is the task of culture to impose the feeling of unity” in order to justify itself. And examples in their very assertion as examples — much as the assertion of cultural identity–imply a universality and are “linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity” (xxvi).

Ultimately, Derrida argues that, in any postmodern definition of identity (cultural or otherwise), we must become more adept at not only understanding but incorporating, providing for the other heading, the heading of the Other. “Derrida thus seeks a redefinition of European identity that includes respect for both universal values and difference” (xlvi). Cultural identity–like any of the other terms of identification Derrida has deconstructed–is shown to be a product of what it is not, of how it defines itself “against” or “as different than” its Other. And the moment of identity crisis is the moment of identity definition. “The ends and confines, the finitude of Europe, are beginning to emerge . . . when the capital of infinity and universality . . . finds itself encroached upon or in danger” (32).

But this is not a call for diversity “for its own sake.” In fact, the urge to “pop” diversity is –as any commodified and unopposed doctrine–its own worst enemy: self-negating, homogenizing. And this is, after all, the fear the forces of social conservatism invoke: that multiculturalism in fact seeks uniculturalism, a “homogeneity” which is in all contexts “politically correct.” Thus, ironically, the Right presents itself as arguing from the position of the underdog, the brave resistance, the Individual; from a position of Diversity. “Claiming to speak in the name of intelligibility, good sense, common sense, or the democratic ethic, this discourse tends, by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to discredit anything that complicates this model [of univocity]” (55).

Nowhere is this strategy clearer than in the discourse of “family values.” If we deconstruct the phrase in the economic context of cultural capital, we can see that a call to “family values” is in fact a prescription for the “value family.” And the value or “economy” family would be the one which required the least expenditure of cultural capital, which could be least expensively reproduced and circulated, which could become the “example” or “standard” family; one which made the fewest demands on our culture in terms of pluralism, of adjustment and experimentation; that would be the “best buy” family ideology.

The “family values” (or value family) debate raises what Derrida sees as the greatest new danger in the arena of cultural identity: the consensus.

Consensus is, after all, the political watchword of the 90s. “Consensus politics” summons up a vague image of agreements which are not compromises but rather somehow expressions of an “inner” unity, a “common” faith. But in fact Derrida warns against letting such “normative” code words disguise old cultural hegemony as new cultural identity; norms which create what he terms a “remote control,” the control being in the hands of whoever controls media networks; networks whose strength resides not in discovering and articulating cultural differences but rather in repressing and re-figuring differences to appear as “consumable” or “popular” opinions, consensus opinions.

The question “Today, what is public opinion?” begins the second section of the book. Derrida begins his answer by calling public opinion the “silhouette of a phantom.” That is, transitory, ephemeral (“lasting only one day”); a fluid and constructed “image” of what is supposedly a deep-rooted, widespread attitude; an attitude which nonetheless must be tested and re-constructed almost everyday to sound its strength, gauge its direction.

But where does one locate the “public”? In the past, the word indicated the dis-empowered, the voiceless, the segment of a culture which was anything but the head, which possessed anything but the capital. But “today,” the term grants legitimacy to the “decisions” of the invisible consensus. Invisible because, today, where is the boundary between public and private? What is not public? “The wandering of its proper body is also the ubiquity of a specter”; “one cites it, one makes it speak, ventriloquizes it” (87).

Derrida suggests that this phantom of “public opinion” requires some medium, for a phantom is that precisely because it lacks the “medium” by which to effect actual change in the physical world. The medium here is the daylight of the media: newspapers, TV, telephones: “the newspaper or daily produces the newness of this news as much as reports it” (89). And, Derrida argues, this phantom must always express itself through this medium as a “judgement,” a choice between two alternatives, a favoring of one side of a binarism over the other. Thus the “voice” of public opinion is reduced to a simple yea or nea, an affirmation of choices already made, programmed into it. “Everything that is not of the order of judgement, decision, and especially representation escapes both present-day democratic institutions and public opinions” (92).

Who rules this phantom is whoever best controls the discourse of these judgements, who decides what the binarism will exclude; an act Derrida calls the “new censorship,” a culturally hegemonic strategy “which combines concentration and fractionalization, accumulation and privatization. It de-politicizes” (100). Of course, the Right’s root axiom in America is that only the left speaks from “ideology,” i.e. dogmatism. And the appeal of this attack on “political correctness” is nostalgic: it purports to recall a time when the “correct” mode of the university and the workplace was apolitical, a time before politics “contaminated” the private and commercial spheres.

However, there is, not surprisingly, another problem (or paradox) here. For Derrida also warns against dispersion, against cultivating “minority differences, untranslatable idiolects, national antagonisms” just “for their own sake.” A reasonable question is then: Who is to tell the difference? The difference, that is, between legitimate claims of minorities, idiolects, etc., and those exercises of diversity which are “for their own sake”?

Derrida’s prescription is that “One must therefore try to invent gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alliance of these two imperatives, of these two promises or contracts: the capital and . . . the other of the capital.” For Europe, this means “welcoming foreigners in order not only to integrate them but to recognize and accept their alterity,” as well as “criticizing . . . a totalitarian dogmatism that, under the pretense of putting an end to capital, destroyed democracy and the European heritage” (45).

What the entire essay finally works toward is the “impossible” way between (or beyond or aside from) “monopoly [and] dispersion.” Which requires us first of all to think of cultural identity as something other than cultural capital, as a past investment which must gain and never lose interest, which can never be “wasted” on “expensive” experiments with alternative social structures, such as, for instance, non-traditional families. Those acquainted with Derrida’s other writings will find this call for an “impossible” ethics familiar. Derrida argues that the possible alternatives are always those “programmatic extensions” of policies already in place; that decisions which choose from among the possible alternatives are decisions already made, long before: “politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of aporia”; “The condition or possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention” (41).

Such a new conception of identity–again, cultural or otherwise–will not be easy to either articulate or disseminate; not in Europe, certainly not in America. Binarism is so deeply embedded in Western thought, in Indo-European language, that perhaps it is only surprising that we can see through such thinking at all, even momentarily.

But if not conformity, and not chaos, then what? East Germany, Yugoslavia, MacDonald franchises, EuroDisney, the umpteenth Far Flung Shore where cowed natives greet American monster truck rallies called Operation Just Do It with the sincere smiles of future entrepreneurs . . . all these “examples” would seem to provide very little optimism for a successful “impossible” invention of this new cultural identity, an identity which inherently asserts not only its own heading but also that of its other.

How to acknowledge the past, yet transcend it? How to provide examples, yet avoid dominance?

At the end of Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” the narrator counsels the reader against devoting any worry at all to the buried-if-not-dead, the gone-if-not-forgotten, advising us to let the memorialized be forgotten, to let sleeping ” sepulchral terrors” lie, and worry not whether their sleep is eternal or restless: “–they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish” (268).

Clearly Derrida disagrees. Only by being constantly aware of but not in thrall to the past are we aware of the “restless” cinders encrypted in each and every word we use, and can realize the paradoxes of the language (and logic) of exemplarity which expresses and thus molds the way we conceive of our problems, and thus the way we construct our solutions. In Cinders and The Other Heading, Derrida offers compelling evidence that, whatever the result of the urge toward memorialization currently underway in the American academy, Derridean deconstruction is alive and well and quite up to the challenges of the new century.

Notes

1. “The Premature Burial,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: The Modern Library, 1938.

2. New York Review of Books #13, 1992.

3. “Deconstruction After the Fall”, AWP Chronicle, Vol 25 #3, 1992.

4. While fully 95 titles dealing with deconstruction are listed in the relatively under-stocked Johns Hopkins library, perhaps half of the latest include the word “after” or “anti” or “against” in their titles. As for the public press: “deconstruction” appeared recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Chicago magazine, and in a Newsweek article on architect Philip Johnson. It’s even the name of a record label.

5. “The Discipline of Deconstruction,” PMLA, October, 1992, Vol 107 #5, 1266-1279.

6. The latest in burial technology were coffins with alarm bells on top that might be rung by a reawakened victim tugging on a cord which dangled inside.

7. “Paradox” rather than “problem,” as calling something a “problem” automatically implies that one is seeking a solution; a way to repair the problem, some teleological methodology which can be demonstrated to rectify the flaw discovered, and which can then be stored, like a tool, for future use.

8. Literally “fire the cinder.”

9. There are many critics of deconstruction and Derridean analysis whose methods are rigorously scholastic and whose results are rhetorically insightful; critics who have engaged the “political unconscious” at work in the patterns and focuses of Derrida’s own readings, and who have gone on to develop quite distinct “deconstructive” readings, particularly in the areas of feminist and post-colonial literary theory.

10. As Nealon points out, for the real culprits of this particular misreading we must exhume the first American presentations of Derrida’s work: Culler’s On Deconstruction, Norris’s Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, and Deconstruction and Criticism (which included work by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Hillis Miller); works which established a deconstructive tradition Nealon criticizes as “commodified . . . simplified and watered down” (1269).

11. For instance, in Displacement: Derrida and After (Indiana University Press, 1983), a collection of essays on the whole supportive of deconstruction, we are told by Mark Krupnick in the introduction that the term displacement “is not theoretically articulated in Derrida’s writing” (1). But far worse than this, Krupnick’s grasp of Derrida’s “neutralization” of the logic of metaphysical dichotomies is so weak that he then goes on to write of a “new (post-Hegelian) dispensation, in the reign of difference (as opposed to identity),” showing himself still completely in thrall to that very (il)logic. Krupnick’s introduction is all too typical of the misreading of and outright deafness to Derrida’s early writings.

12. See for instance “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., New York: Routledge, 1992.

13. It is the very idea of what we mean by this “presence” that Derrida wishes to reverse and displace–but not neutralize: “We thus come to posit presence . . . no longer as the absolute matrix form of being but rather as a ‘particularization’ and ‘effect’” Marges, 17).

14. Of course, the true representation of this dynamic would include many more than just two forces.

15. We see this distinction in Derrida’s definition of differance: “a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Differance is the systematic play of differences, or traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate to one another” Positions, 39).

16. Quoted in “The MLA on Trial” by Stephen Greenblatt, Profession 92, 39-41.

September 25, 2013
Cookbooks for Theory and Performance

Josephine Lee

Department of English
Smith College
jolee@smith

Case, Sue-Ellen, and Janelle Reinelt, eds. The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph R. Roach, eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

One can clearly see the directions in which research in theater and drama is moving by browsing through titles of new books and articles, of new journals that have begun or renewed their life in the last five years, and of papers presented at the annual conferences held by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). Scholarship and criticism in theater and drama have become much more explicitly theoretical, and the theories used are much more interdisciplinary, with New Historicism, feminist theory, and now cultural studies, moving to the forefront. Not only have the old theories of theater and drama lost their exclusive charms; what is considered the primary object of study is no longer what happens in the theater and even less what can be read on the pages of the playtext. Performance has become a much broader, even all-encompassing term, and there is no longer an easy distinction between the theatrical and the real. Though theatricality, acting, and the stage have long provided those working in other disciplines (Sigmund Freud, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, to name a few) with easy metaphors, it is more novel and refreshing to have those who have worked more closely with theater turn their attention to events which take place off as well as on the stage.

Two recent collections, The Performance of Power and Critical Theory and Performance, act as methodological cookbooks illustrating this “nouvelle cuisine” of performance studies. Both offer a variety of recipes for the ways in which current critical theory might intersect with drama, theater, and performance. Reading either would give one a good idea of what, professionally speaking, is in demand: what is considered nutritious, desirable, appetizing, successful. This is not to say that either book is geared toward the novice; on the contrary, negotiating the ambitious and rather dizzying range of essays presented in these books demands at least some sophistication. But at the same time a certain didacticism can be read, both explicitly and implicitly, in both books. For those who are desirous of success in a field increasingly focused on academic professionalism, the books promise at least a cursory sense of competence with what one needs to interact, publish, and establish oneself.

The editors of both books, to their credit, make this didacticism clear. Janelle Reinelt and Sue-Ellen Case, the editors of The Performance of Power state explicitly how their book might work as an “entry-level text–a how-to for beginning to apply such considerations to theatrical texts and practices” (xix). Critical Theory and Performance also turns itself into a teaching text by supplying careful introductions, summarizing theoretical viewpoints, identifying seminal texts, and defining key terminology, all the while advertising the excitement of applying the “new theory” to drama, theater, and performance.

Thus it is worth looking more closely not only at the individual essays included in these books, but also these organizing principles and agendas which inform them. My criticisms of both books are directed primarily at the latter. This is not to deny that the books do contain individual articles which are noteworthy in their own right. Joe Roach’s work on the “artificial eye” of Augustan theater, Spencer Golub’s on the iconization of Chaplin in postrevolutionary Russia, and Tracy Davis’s readings of Annie Oakley in particular show the exciting results of critical theory, meticulous scholarship, and intelligent writing. And even the more tentative essays included here do provide useful models for the appropriate ways in which experimentation is allowed to take place, and deviation from norms is allowed to occur.

Yet I would focus on some of the distinct disadvantages of embracing the power structures inscribed within certain kinds of academic discourse. Although these two books clearly show evidence of how the “new theory” provides the fuel for some exciting work, they also make plain that dimension of what is inevitably disagreeable and frustrating about scholarship. With the eagerness to take on the terms of the “new theory” comes the occasional oversimplification of theory into formula, a willingness to teach rather conventional lessons of academic professionalism, and to that end, a deployment of confused and sometimes misleading arrangements of methodological categories.

Particularly revealing are the ways in which the books create theoretical space both through the choice of essays, and the headings they assign to them. The personal taste and prejudices of the editors seem less important than their attempts to negotiate the complex expectations of the academic profession. Both books shun the old historical periodizations and cultural distinctions, and instead follow divisions loosely guided by post-structuralist theory, bearing the headings “Materialist Semiotics,” “After Marx,” and “Critical Convergences.”

Where such headings become troubling is where the articles which follow them are not elucidated by them. The first two sections in The Performance of Power, for instance, are labelled “Materialist Semiotics” and “Deconstruction.” None of these terms seems all that clear to begin with, and the very different choices made in each of the essays, of subject matter and line of interrogation, makes the terminology even more confusing. For example, both “Materialist Semiotics” and “Deconstruction” cover a great range of topics: Kim Hall on the discourse of blackness in the Jonsonian masque, Sarah Bryant-Bertail on The Good Soldier Schwejk and the apparatus of political theater, David Savran on the Wooster Group, J. Ellen Gainor on imperialist Shaw, Geoffrey Bredbeck on Renaissance sodomy, and Jeffrey Mason on John Augustus Stone’s 1892 Metamora. Each of these essays is less wedded to the others by persistent theoretical questioning than by an appeal to older, tried-and-true foundations of historical research. Although the political cast gives the task a new urgency, the methodology remains based on close textual readings bent on unearthing historical and textual evidence for interpretation. Clearly, this is still effective. But though the quality of the essays is high, it remains unclear what they are doing in these theoretical categories. Not surprisingly, the exception is when one of the editors of this volume, Sue-Ellen Case, makes more of an effort to investigate questions of theory and methodology in her own contribution to the “Deconstruction” section. Her essay “The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics” is less a reading of specific plays than a first attempt at investigation of the “strategies of concealment, suppression, and displacement” that take place in the works of theater critics, historians, and practitioners who, in constructing Sanskrit theatrical traditions, inevitably collude with “colonial imperial practices” (124).

The same uneasiness haunts Critical Theory and Performance. Although its introduction is designed to answer much more explicitly theoretical questions, its categorization of essays too renders unclear what “deconstruction” for the theater is, and what distinguishes it from “semiotics.” Here both terms are placed into a single category: “Semiotics and Deconstruction.” That two such different theoretical articulations should seem so much alike in practice remains unexplained here as well. The articles included in this section of Critical Theory are all centered on contemporary productions: Jim Carmody explores the transplantation of The Misanthrope to 1989 Hollywood, David McDonald writes with a director’s view of his own productions of David Hare’s Fanshen, and John Rouse examines the Wooster Group, Heiner Muller, and Robert Wilson. Such a choice might provide a perfect opportunity to discuss the problems of historical reconstruction of the theatrical event, and the implicit claim for the authoritative presence of spectatorship: central issues for poststructuralist theory. But such a conversation is lacking in both the essays and introduction, as is any sustained discussion of postmodernist theater practice.

Again, a too-easy conflation of theoretical terms in the “Hermeneutics and Phenomenology” section of Critical Theory and Performance puts both essays included here at a disadvantage. The insights of Thomas Postlewait’s “History, Hermeneutics, and Narrativity” are more useful in conjunction with the earlier section on “Theater History and Historiography.” Postlewait’s thoughts on how the “challenge for historians . . . is to understand better how the models and discourse of narrativity organize the writing process” Critical Theory 363) work beautifully to help frame earlier essays, such as Tracy Davis’s fascinating study of Annie Oakley and her “ideal husband,” and to support the skepticism of both Rosemary Bank and Vivian Patraka towards the dualistic discourse of political theater. The essay which is paired with Postlewait, however, is Bert State’s “The Phenomenological Attitude.” State’s eloquent essay deserves accompaniment from others involved with the practice of phenomenological criticism or perhaps studies of audience reception. As it is, States’s essay exists in a vacuum, as a kind of ghost theory from the past, and one is tempted to pass it over for the more glittering theories of the other sections.

The “Psychoanalysis” section of Critical Theory and Performance seems rather bare as well. Although it contains two essays which are interesting in their own right, one by Elin Diamond on theatrical identification, and the other by Mohammad Kowsar on Lacan’s reading of Antigone, the pairing does not work. I was struck by how empty this section seems in light of what disciplines such as film studies have been able to do with Freud and Lacan. That psychoanalytic theory has had a profound effect on theory and performance is evident throughout the book, and other essays could easily have been redistributed to give this section more weight. In particular Sue- Ellen Case’s later article, with its metaphor of the “coupling” of theory and history in some “primal scene,” might have been placed here instead of in the final section entitled “Critical Convergences.” For that matter, Herbert Blau’s piece, also in this final section, would have worked as well or better in “After Marx.” Eliminating this final section would also help avoid the troubling implication that well-known critics such as Case and Blau deserve their own special section and the last word on as well as in critical theory and performance.

But a troubling reliance on the star system runs throughout Critical Theory and is implicit in The Performance of Power as well. Though neither book fully succumbs to what Gay Gibson calls the “blockbuster” approach of academic conference panels Power 258), both do make clear who the well-known scholars in the field are, and what they are interested in. More than once, certain essays seem to have been included for the sake of capturing the authoritative presence of the writer, rather than for scholarly or methodological reasons. Nina Auerbach’s essay “Victorian Players and Sages” is an uneasy choice for The Performance of Power; although Auerbach ends with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, her interest is more thematic and literary, linking great works with other great works, Wordsworth with Bronte heroines. Janice Carlisle’s piece, which immediately precedes Auerbach’s, sheds far more light on the nature of Victorian theatricality. In light of all that Richard Schechner has done to encourage new approaches to the theater, his essay on “Direct Theater” is disappointing. Schechner makes the mistake of describing significant media events in a “You Are There” style, and removing them from their complex historical and political contexts. Some of his casual comparisons, such as that which he makes between the 1970 anti-Vietnam “carnival” held in Washington, and the 1989 protests by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, can be downright insulting.

There also seems to be a marked tendency to insist on the relevance of well-known theorists for theatrical studies. When Marvin Carlson considers the possible uses of Bakhtin’s terms “dialogism” and “heteroglossia” for theater and performance, his conclusions are so optimistic that he out-Bakhtins Bakhtin. This eagerness to employ a theoretical vocabulary leads one to suspect that in the essays as well as the introductions, theoretical approaches are sometimes absorbed rather than questioned too closely. In the section labelled “Cultural Studies,” for instance, the first essays seem models of careful scholarship and sensitivity, a blend of traditional scholarship and new theoretical positions. It is not until James Moy’s article that the position of enlightened cultural critic is challenged. Moy finds what he calls a “new order of stereotypical representations” of Asians in plays hailed by others as breaking new ground. Moy’s objections, although not altogether agreeable, are argued with disconcerting vigor; his voice is polemical, challenging readers to dispute as well as applaud his efforts.

Overall, the most successful section in either book is the grouping in Critical Theory and Performance entitled “Feminism(s).” Here essays work with and against one another in ways both satisfying and thought-provoking. Of particular interest is Kate Davy’s essay, which persuasively argues the inability of lesbian performance to be served by using the strategy of camp, and Jill Dolan’s work, which questions what she calls the troubling “sanctimonious structures of politically correct lesbian identifications” (266), and looks for ways in which less attractive representations of gender and power might be reconciled with feminism. Jeanie Forte’s examinations of the theatrical female body, and Ellen Donkin’s work on Sarah Siddons as split subject, are also part of the focused and engaged set of theoretical questions that feminist critics explore inside and outside the theater.

In contrast, the other sections in Critical Theory and Performance seem rather tentative as articulations of theoretical positions. In the “After Marx” section in particular, the essays seem curiously restrained, and the heated debates anticipated in the introduction do not materialize. Most of the essays call for revision and reform, but do so in a tone of academic disengagement. Both Bruce McConachie’s perceptive examination of the term “production” a la Raymond Williams, and Philip Auslander’s interesting comments on stand-up comedy as baby-boomer refuge, make rather subdued conclusions. Jim Merod chooses a more polemical set of questions on theory and the academic profession, but his remarks seem directed at a very different audience; his section on jazz does not offer any insights into performance or theory more stirring than “it may be that music is the lingua franca of all people and all culture and that jazz is its most common discourse” (193). Most immediately and enjoyably provocative in this section is David Roman’s essay, which challenges the liberal view of AIDS as a scientific reality and the resultant rational/disinterested liberal response to the epidemic.

The Performance of Power avoids some of the problems which are accentuated in Critical Theory and Performance by not billing itself as a “theory” book, and preserving an emphasis on text and production. To this end, the book moves away from categories evoking poststructualist theory into headings such as “Revealing Surveillance Strategies” and “Constructing Utopias.” The book does not, however, treat the theater as a privileged aesthetic space of high culture; rather, it affirms that theatrical performance participates fully in the dynamics of power that characterize all forms of discourse. Power in the theater is not just what is represented within some fictionalized stage world, but also what is inscribed in the relationships between performers, spectators, and societies in the act of performing.

Happily, the book is suspicious of power in academic circles as well. The Performance of Power gives sustained attention to the power dynamics played out in academic departments, the classroom, and conference panels, in what Sue-Ellen Case calls “the production of knowledge at the site of the academy as performance” Critical Theory 422). The book begins with a narrative account of the specific conferences from which the idea for the collection took its shape, and ends with a section on the state of the profession, with a series of essays calling for the redistribution of power, more interdisciplinary research, and the need for revitalization of both research and pedagogy. While these final essays are vocal about the need for change as well as the changes that are already taking place, they express their complaints in rather too moderate and reasonable voices. I miss the angry and impassioned call for more radical institutional reform, and a more sustained self-questioning of the writer’s own complicity in the preserving the status quo.

Still, the power structures of the academy do come under fire in The Performance of Power, in ways that are oddly absent in Critical Theory and Performance. The latter volume has a much more cautious, “rules-of- the-game” feel to it. Billed on the back cover as “the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance,” it promises to teach state of the art academic professionalism to a field long accused of insularity and backwardness. Such an advertisement may go unchallenged; the other books, articles, and collections which might claim to be seminal in this field were also written by those very “leading critics and practitioners” who were “specially commissioned” for this book.

The Performance of Power and Critical Theory and Performance reveal much about the current demands of the field; to the skeptical and resistant reader, they will reveal even more. Even though these books leave many crucial questions of practice and methodology unanswered, they are important and necessary reading for anyone who wishes to engage critically with theater, drama, and performance studies; the choices made in both books are worth studying closely. To call something “deconstruction” is neither arbitrary nor whimsical, even when the term is unexplained or misapplied; it is by means of such labellings that a sub-discipline attains recognition and credibility within larger circles of discourse. We who study theater and drama have been relatively late in jumping onto the theory bandwagon. But now that we are on board, we must engage with the dynamics of power, authority, and value that are imposed by the new conventions as well as the old. Thus, professionally speaking, there is much to be gained through reading these books, even if only one or two of the individual essays are relevant to one’s own particular areas of interest. Whether one ultimately dismisses the “nouvelle” performance studies as mere passing fashion, or finds that it actually tastes good, to be active in the discipline today means at least sitting down to this sort of table. And I, for one, hate to eat alone.

September 25, 2013
Hitchcock: The Industry

James Morrison

Department of English
North Carolina State University

Kapsis, Robert E. Hitchock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

After more than twenty years, if we date its inception at the publication of Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965), the Hitchcock industry is still burgeoning. On and on they come in unstoppable waves, these dense treatises on The Master’s high vernacular or low comedy, on films re-released or securely canonized. Even if we dismiss those books that are patently “popular,” like Donald Spoto’s biography, or those that give Hitchcock only a sustained sidelong glance, like Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry, we are still left to contend with some two dozen ample volumes–this in the field of film studies that is itself barely twenty years old. The latest spasm of production alone has yielded at least three books, each from a university press: Stefan Sharff’s on Hitchcock’s High Vernacular from Columbia, Thomas Leitch’s Find the Director from Georgia, and now Kapsis’s volume from Chicago. What this largely academic enterprise lacks in the glittery trappings of, say, the mass-market Malcolm-X-drive–no Hitchcock caps as yet, no Hitchcock breakfast cereal–it makes up for with a certain scholarly self-consciousness. One is not surprised, then, to see at last a book about the industry itself.

Kapsis’s thesis is simple: The evolution of Hitchcock’s reputation since the late fifties has been intricately connected to general permutations in film aesthetics during the same period. The first chapter lays the study’s theoretical groundwork by adapting the sociologist Harold Becker’s concept of “art-worlds” to the field of film. Chapters two through five trace Hithcock’s reputation from its initial phases, where Hitchcock is understood as “mere entertainer” or “master of suspense,” through the efforts of Hithcock and his partisans to reshape his reputation into that of a “serious artist,” culminating in the director’s canonization in academe. Final chapters consider the effect of the “Hithcock legacy” on the thriller genre itself as well as on the career of Brian De Palma, then compare the making of Hitchcock’s reputation to that of the reputations of Hawks, Capra, Lang, Clint Eastwood, and, in the “art-world” of music, Vladimir Horowitz. The particular strategies Kapsis’s work values are not close-analysis or theoretical expansiveness (nor the rhetorical flourishes that usually accompany them) but comprehensive scrutiny and empirical doggedness. These last his work achieves, and the attendant clarity of his style would be unimpeachable if clarity were an end in itself, if relentless comprehensiveness guaranteed genuine comprehension. Clearly, the book’s subject has the potential to bring into focus key issues in contemporary film studies, from much-debated ones like the status of the auteur to little- discussed ones like the process of canon formation. But in spite of the value of some of its research, the book misses its most important opportunities.

The first problem is one of methodology. Kapsis negotiates Becker’s conception of the “art-world” with a version of reception theory he traces from Jauss through Wendy Griswold’s work. His first key assumption, then, derived from Becker, is that cultural products “are influenced by or imbedded in the immediate organizational, legal, and economic environments in which they are produced” (5); his second is that “‘meaning’ is produced or ‘fabricated’ by the interaction between reader and text” (8). In spite of the earnest conviction of these observations, neither is likely to strike occupants of the film-studies trenches as urgent news from the battle-front. What may be novel, though, is the sense in which Kapsis intends his inflections. In the first quotation, for example, “immediate” is the operative word, and refers not just to studios or audiences as “environments,” but even more “immediately,” to literal facets of production–e.g., conversations on the set during filming. Moreover, the “meaning” that gets produced, through whatever means, is seen to be a product of films’ embeddedness in these environments. Thus, elements of Hitchcock’s style that other critics have more conventionally seen as modernist gestures or personal insignia are conceived as Hithcock’s “practice of including unusual shots or sequences in his films for their calculated effect on the more serious critics” (25). A less romanticized vision of the auteur than that implied here is hard to imagine; but what’s an “unusual shot”? Who are the “serious critics,” and how do they get to be “more” serious than the others?

In registering such points, I mean to suggest that the seemingly “progressive” aspects of Kapsis’s methodology are built upon an extremely traditional base and become, therefore, themselves questionable. In spite of the presumed emphasis on shifting patterns of reception, Kapsis begins with a survey of Hitchcock’s career that would be perfectly at home in any coffee-table picture-book: “Both Rope and Under Capricorn] exploited technical means at the expense of narrative flow and neither one generated much business. It would seem that Hitchcock had temporarily lost touch with his audience” (25). In a study that claims to examine changing critical assumptions, it is not beside the point to ask what a “narrative flow” is, how “technical means” can disrupt it, and what this might have to do with audience response. In any case, the usual version of audience response to these films is that audiences found the first bombastic and the second dull. Should a current study simply reproduce this received narrative? More to the point: the “technical means” Hitchcock is exploiting in these films involve historically unprecedented play with the long-take sequence-shot. Indeed, promotion for the films emphasized the sequence-shot and the moving camera as novelties to draw audiences–“Come see Ingrid Bergman in the longest take in movie history!”–who still found the films bombastic and dull. The failure of this effort to manipulate reception complicates Kapsis’s claim that such efforts began late in Hitchcock’s work. More generally, his unreflective reproduction of standard surveys of Hitchcock’s career markedly undermines his later attempts to examine the assumptions on which such surveys might be based.

In fact, although Kapsis approvingly quotes Griswold to the effect that a cultural object “has no meaning independent of its being experienced” (9), he is prone to categorical assertions about the nature of certain films of Hitchcock. For example, he sees Psycho and Vertigo as “essentially anti-romances, violating many of the conventions and rules that were associated with the Hithcock thriller in the late fifties” (56) and later finds that Lesley Brill “correctly” (56) makes the same claim in The Hitchcock Romance (Princeton 1988). If the purpose of the study as a whole is to show how “changes in critical discourse over the past few decades have shaped the ‘meaning’ of Hitchcock’s works” (122), Kapsis’s own analyses are perhaps obliged to present themselves as interpretive acts that have similarly been shaped by prior discourses. Yet the normativity of his point here is startling in the context of his presumed methodology. Here the films are assumed to have certain attributes that audiences simply did not welcome; or, elsewhere, particular films simply were poor and were rightly recognized as such by audiences; or else particular films were really one thing but were incorrectly perceived by audiences as something else; and so on. In this instance, in any case, it seems clear enough that the “essential” quality Kapsis discovers in these films is to be distinguished from the provisional “meanings” other critics locate there.

If Brill is “correct” to find patterns of romance at the foundation of Hitchcock’s work, Robin Wood is apparently quite wrong to see Marnie as a fully-realized masterpiece (Wood’s category, not mine) instead of as the shoddy bag of goods most critics had earlier seen. Initial reviews of this film which Kapsis sees as the turing point in Hitchcock’s reputation history emphasized what they claimed was its technical ineptitude–ugly back-projection, awkward red-suffusions of the image, clumsy zoom-shots. Wood’s landmark revaluation of the film sees these elements as part of a complex design. But Kapsis, whose posture is ordinarily one of professorial equanimity, will have none of it. Presenting Wood as a dyed-in-the-wool auteurist (and missing thereby Wood’s inheritance from the work of F. R. Leavis), Kapsis lengthily quotes Wood’s argument and then, rather than engage it, blusters in an unwittingly comic rehearsal of thirty-year-old misconceptions of auteurism, “Wood’s point once again is that Hitchcock can really do no wrong” (128). In fact, Wood’s point is that the devices work in his analysis of the film and that they are part of Hitchcock’s German Expressionist heritage but are now perceived as anachronistic by popular audiences. In other words, Wood’s point is more attuned to shifts in viewers’ assumptions about film style than is Kapsis’s inarticulate rejection of it. More to the point, technical “deficiencies” are in no way isolated to Marnie in Hitchcock’s work. The Lady Vanishes, for example, makes absurdly obvious use of miniatures and Notorious contains examples of back-projection at least as obtrusive as any in Marnie. Given these facts and Kapsis’s thesis, the question he should be asking is why these “deficiencies” became an issue in the reception of Marnie when they did not in the reception of the earlier films.

Instead, Kapsis treats the reader to a protracted examination of the film’s production file, which body of knowledge “simply fails to support” (131) Wood’s argument. According to the production files, as Kapsis reads them, it seems Hitchcock “sought external reality but technical mishaps ensued” (129). In turn, this information “points to how the auteur critics’ expectations of finding artistic purpose and consistency in the works of their favorite auteur directions [sic] could lead to exaggerated claims about a film’s implicit meanings” (129). It is worth noting that Wood himself deals explicitly with such critical issues at the outset of his study, albeit in a fairly standard New Critical way: “What concerns (or should concern) the critic is not what a film is ‘really intended’ to be, but what it actually is” Hitchcock’s Films 13). Wood even goes on to quote Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller–trust the tale,” an epigram in which, to judge from the fact that he first misquotes it then wrongly attributes it to Joseph Conrad, Kapsis himself does not put much stock. In the context Kapsis had appeared to be trying to establish, in any case, the notion of an “erroneous” (130) reading of a text is a troubling one. Wood’s valuation of organic coherence is here simply opposed to Kapsis’s modulated empiricism where the real issue had formerly seemed to be the social, aesthetic or other causes of such interpretive differences. For Kapsis, the issue is (as usual) simple: “Wood’s polemical agenda led him astray” (130). Similarly, treating feminist reinterpretations of Marnie, Kapsis hopes to determine which are “most faithful to the Marnie text” (139), obviously contradicting his earlier presumption that meaning is contingent on reception.

Kapsis’s treatment of auteurism, in general, further illuminates methodological problems in his study. His version of auteurism is monolithic and simplified, and he posits auteurism as both cause and effect in the making of Hitchcock’s reputation. Perhaps assuming (wrongly, if so) that the implications of auteur theory have been played out fully in film studies, Kapsis treats the topic at its basic level by implication, and his references to it are dispersed broadly across the text. One of the results of this is an elementary form of repetition characteristic of Kapsis’s style. Each time he mentions auteurism, he does so as if introducing the topic but, at the same time, as if it had already been adequately explicated. Hitchcock’s reputation as a “serious artist” is strengthened “during the 1970s when the auteur theory dominated film studies” (122); the growing pedigree of horror movies is “a trend traceable to the rise of auteur theory in the late 1960s” (162); it was “during the early sixties that . . . auteur critics actively sought to elevate Hitchcock’s stature” (216); Hitchcock’s standing “improved in the sixties as the auteur theory came to dominate both journalistic and academic discourse in the cinema” (228); and so on.

This atomization of the topic makes it nearly impossible to extrapolate from the argument a clear view of what Kapsis thinks auteurism is, but in any case he gives no sense of the roots of auteurism in structuralism, of the crucial debates among early auteurists or of its complex evolution, or indeed of the very aesthetic of auteur theory. Kapsis’s schematic conception of auteur theory consists of two elements. First, “according to these critics, the individual ‘auteur’ was the sole source of a film’s meaning: the artist’s personal vision transcended ‘reality,’ ‘history,’ and ‘society’” (224-25). Second, in “advancing their views, the auteur critics constructed a new pantheon of directors wherein certain directors were singled out for special praise while the rest were demoted or ignored” (216). The first of these claims is redolent of a popular take on auteurism, deriving from a reading not so much of Bazin, Rivette, Chabrol and Rohmer or Godard (to say nothing of Levi-Strauss!) but of Pauline Kael. In fact, cine- structuralism (as it was sometimes called in the seventies) insists on the impossibility of “transcending” “history” and so on; it is, indeed, because all forms of human communication are seen in this model as rigidly controlled by predetermined structures that the auteurists find it possible to attend in the first place to genre films, which in this context are no more “formulaic” and therefore no less “serious” than any other predetermining structure. Yet so unaware does Kapsis seem of the crucial connection between auteurism and structuralism that he regards genre criticism as opposed to auteurism rather than as a crucial component of it: “the auteur viewpoint rather than a genre orientation framed much of the critical discourse on Topaz” (105). If auteur theory means nothing more than seeing “the director as a major source of meaning” (228), then American film criticism has been auteurist from its inception to the present.

Kapsis’s conception of the auteurist canon, or “pantheon,” is even more disturbing because of its implications for his concpetion of canonicity itself in the project as a whole. For Kapsis, taste seems to be a purely whimsical phenomenon. Thus, according to Kapsis, the first generation of auteurists slap together an apparently arbitrary “pantheon” while the next generation simply “countered the established pantheon with one of their own choosing” (217)–with no effort made to account for or even discuss the choices. Why are “certain directors” singled out for “special praise”? Because they are auteurs. How do we know they are auteurs? Because they have been singled out. Favoring Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lang, and Welles, Kapsis tells us, the auteurists “dismissed as second- or third-rate” Huston, Wyler, Stevens, Zinneman, and Wilder. Kapsis is partially right to suggest that the first group is valued because “despite having worked within the old Hollywood studio system, [they] had somehow managed to retain in their work a personal vision” (217). However, he does not even attempt to account for the “dismissal” of the others (nor to prove that dismissal, especially pertinent in the case of Wyler); nor indeed could he do so in the terms of his simplified account of auteurism. The auteurist dismissal of Huston, for example, is predicated on structuralist assumptions. Because they see Huston as naively believing he can “transcend” genre, by among other ways adapting idiosyncratic literary texts to film, the auteurists reject him.

Kapsis’s work yields no mechanism by which to examine the social or aesthetic causes of cultural change. He is interested only in the effect of cultural change (and even that in only a simple way), and thus does not ask, as he observes shifts in Hitchcock’s reputation, how and why what Pierre Bourdieu would call the rearrangement of cultural capital takes place. Bourdieu’s monumental work Distinction provides what are currently the definitive ways of discussing the sociology of cultural value, and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and its relation to social capital is one Kapsis might profitably have engaged, especially given Kapsis’s intent to inflect film studies with modes of thought from sociology. Specifically, Bourdieu argues that the “bourgeois” aesthetic is to be distinguished from the “popular” aesthetic by way of the latter’s demand for participatory interaction and the former’s distanciation, its separation from ordinary, non-aesthetic dispositions. Such a distinction bears obvious relevance to a discussion of a mass entertainer’s being co-opted by or crossing over into “serious” art, but Kapsis proceeds as if such distinctions were self-evident. With no such framework in which to function, then, repeated references to texts that “straddled the line between popular genre movies and films with a more elitist intent” (246) can only seem windy and vacant.

The author’s conception of “reputation” itself is impoverished by inattentiveness to– paraphrasing Bourdieu–modes of appropriation of art-works across cultural strata. Kapsis’s study uses as its chief evidence journalistic reviews and critical articles, with occasional references to box-office figures. Much work in reception theory, of course, challenges the validity of such evidence as a gauge of a film’s reception, and many of the most interesting studies have relied on other kinds of evidence, such as advertising, non-critical journalism, letters to editors from “average” citizens, or public-relations documents. (Janet Staiger’s Interpreting Films [Princeton 1992] will serve as a model in reception studies for years to come.) Arguing that Hitchcock’s reputation is reshaped from that of professional ghoul to that of “serious artist,” Kapsis begs key questions about levels of culture: Who says when an artist is “serious”? Once Hitchcock is canonized, is his work then unavailable to popular responses? In Kapsis’s version, once the auteurists lay claim on Hitchcock, his days as a “mere entertainer” are over. But his simultaneous canonization in Blockbuster Video stores (as the only director, until lately, to have his own category) or on cable TV, flanked by Patty Duke, Donna Reed and other luminaries of Our Television Heritage suggests otherwise. Yet Kapsis’s version of the Hitchcock reputation remains, like most of his categories, cosily unitary. The British may still hold Hitchcock to the standard of his “early British thrillers” because they “lack the training in film studies of their American counterparts” (157), but we Americans know better.

The appeal of reception studies is its capacity to situate texts within very specific cultural contexts. Not only is Kapsis inattuned to links between cultural practice and social categories, however, he is indifferent to the strata across which a reputation may be defined (that is, a “reputation” is not only one thing at any one time) and the molecular responses to which it is subject. Thus his work is as thoroughly insulated from authentic cultural analysis as the formalism it was meant to replace.

September 25, 2013
Constructing an Archipelago: Writing the Caribbean

Susan J. Ritchie

English Department Ohio State University
sritchie@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective is a marvelously ambitious rereading of Caribbean literature, letters, and culture, deftly translated here by James Maraniss. But what makes the Cuban author’s book a work of particular interest and importance to postmodern studies is the powerful, shifting, and paradoxical framework he has established for articulating the “certain way” of the Caribbean. For Benitez-Rojo’s chief interest is in the ethnological but nonetheless inessential character that might justify the reference to so many diverse islands, peoples, languages, and histories as “the Caribbean.” His “Caribbean” is a constructed, postmodern, and yet finally coherent sociocultural archipelago.

Benitez-Rojo thus engages with the very difficult question of how to perform a cultural study that is postmodern and constructivist but which nonethelessless respects cultural specificities. He puts it this way: “How do we establish that the Caribbean is an important historico-economic sea, and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each a copy of a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor?” (9). Both the value and danger of this work result from the energy and skill with which the author sets often contradictory theoretical apparatuses after this problem and into productive frenzy.

The readings are propelled by a roughly Deleuzian conception of an ordering, productive machine that is the Caribbean itself; the very machine from which Caribbean texts seek to escape in their search for non-violence. He calls this machine the “Plantation,” and it is in his attention to the Plantation that he produces the readings that are one of the real gifts of this text. The Plantation system is for Benitez-Rojo the producer of the similarity of differences that makes up the islands of the Caribbean: “the Plantation proliferated in the Caribbean basin in a way that presented different features in each island, each stretch of coastline, each colonial bloc. Nevertheless . . . these differences, far from negating the existence of a pan-Caribbean society, make it possible in the way that a system off ractal equations of a galaxy is possible” (72).

His most complete identification of the Plantation takes place in an introductory chapter that examines the history of the Caribbean in terms of the Plantation, and in his examination of his two historical texts: Bartholome de Las Casas’ 1875 history of what he still referred to as the Indes (Historia de las Indias), and Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 essay on the role of sugar and tobacco production in the shaping of Cuba (part of Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar). Benitez-Rojo carefully teases out from Las Casas’ text the author’s guilt for having been an original “encomendero” who both justified the Spanish conquest of Cuba and promoted African slavery as the most efficacious means of running sugar plantations. Las Casas, then, is one of the architects of the Plantation–the larger system of exploitation that would come to determine Caribbean culture. Las Casas, though, is no simple bad guy: Benitez-Rojo’s accomplishment is to show how his work also helps discursively to organize the region’s anti-colonial impulses.

Through a scrupulous Freudian reading of Historia” Benitez-Rojo suggests that Las Casas’ text both contains and represents a “rupture” in the “discursive practice that justified the conquest” and that this rupture creates one of the region’s first nationalistic arguments in its imagination of “a providential space in which Europeans, aboriginal peoples, and Africans might live industriously according to religious and civic principles, and where violence toward the Indian and the Negro would be condemned equally by the earthly power of the crown and the Church’s spiritual judgment” (86). The rupture is represented by an enigmatic moment in this historical text: a fantastic description of a plague of ants that reads more like fable than history. Noting the uncanniness of the passage, Benitez-Rojo uses Freudian analysis to show how the fable both disguises and re-presents the actual object of Las Casas’ fascination and guilt: a revolt by plantation slaves. The reading is valuable for its careful attention to the Cuban anti-colonial nationalistic sentiment and to the Plantation’s dual fascination and phobia, its duplicitous posture of defense and exploitation, as regards African culture.

As Benitez-Rojo continues to trace the cultural productions of the Plantation-machine in more detail, he takes pains to identify it as a machine born not of postmodernism, but of the Caribbean itself. So while he characterizes Las Casas’ resistance to the colonial binary of master/slave as “an involuntary flourish of postmodernity” (98), his point is finally that these texts offer something more culturally specific. This concern animates his examinations of Ortiz’s often literally fantastic and fabulous discussions of sugar and tobacco production in Cuba, which is less revealing of that historian’s text than it is of Benitez-Rojo’s attempts to ground his own investigations in the explicitly Caribbean. He finds in Ortiz his own precursor: a proto-scholar of the Plantation: “When Ortiz says that ‘to study the Cuban history is fundamentally to study the history of sugar and tobacco as the visceral systems of its economy’ he is suggesting to us ‘another’ mode of investigation whose prototype would be the ‘Contrapunteo’” (158).

Benitez-Rojo’s only ungenerous reading similarly projects his own conception of the Plantation on to the work of earlier authors. He criticizes the poet Nicolas Guillen, known for his poems about sugar workers, for his Marxism–and also, it would seem, for his failure properly to understand Benitez-Rojo’s own description of the Plantation well over a half a century before it was articulated. It is strange, he writes, “that Guillen, with his profound understanding of the Plantation, should have fallen for the ingenious pattern of thinking that the mechanical transposition of a European doctrine–as Marxism-Leninism is–to a Caribbean island could be successful as a socioeconomic project; I mean, concretely, that an island plantation, Cuba, for example, could ever produce sugar ‘without tears’” (131). The irony, of course, is that Benitez-Rojo himself is unapologetically supportive of applications of Anglo-European postmodern theories to the Caribbean.

Benitez-Rojo is better when he speaks of how he shares this struggle with the West with other Caribbean writers. The Plantation is responsible for the essential paradox of the Caribbean writer: he or she is most Caribbean when most Other. As Benitez-Rojo says of the work of Alejo Carpentier, it “offers itself as a doubly spectacular spectacle: at once directed toward the West in terms of an excess of invention and professional competence (to make an impression, to follow the current), and also directed to the reading in the meta-archipelago, beneath a ritual language, which, in its repetition, tries to interpret two performances of the impossible: to be a Caribbean person and to be there in the Caribbean” (241). Hence in his comparison of the fiction of Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Fanny Buitrago and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, it is Carpentier, whose style bears the greatest resemblance to Western literature, who is celebrated as the most Caribbean. Benitez-Rojo’s eloquent explanation for Carpentier’s appropriation of a largely French naturalism for his own novels is that “It’s obvious that the Path of Words between Europe and America becomes much more assured when one goes out parallel to some famous explorer” (184).

Benitez-Rojo does not always trace clear patterns of connection between these sorts of micro-insights about literature and his larger theoretical statements. Indeed, some of his finest moments are also the most disconnected or incidental to any central agenda or design. One of the many oddities of this book, though, is how, despite the apparently loose theoretical bricolage of his own practice, Benitez-Rojo suggests that the Caribbean and its Plantation can best be approached and understood by way of a single theoretical stance: that of scientific chaos theory. Chaos theory, as we have learned in the wake of its recent boom, describes the scientific attempt to study complex natural patterns and behaviors that previously had been thought too noisy or too random to succumb to empirical and statistical prediction. And for Benitez-Rojo, as for other scholars of postmodern culture, what has proved most appealing about chaos is not its highly technical and repetitive mathematics but its seductive thematics and terminologies.

Indeed, some of the images generated by chaos theory work well for Benitez-Rojo as descriptions of the turbulent character of Caribbean culture. Like the phenomena that chaos scientists study, his Caribbean text is constantly aswirl in bifurcation and paradox–products of a turbulence which allows equally for radical disturbance and creative productivity. The appeal of chaos as an analogy for postcolonialism is evident: chaos provides a model for the interconnectedness of places and phenomena, yet allows even within that interconnection for the possibility of radical disruption. Like much postmodern theory, work in chaos has described how the local might rupture universalizing metanarratives. The “butterfly effect,” for instance, describes the process whereby seemingly small events, compounded through interdependent feedback loops, can have a dramatic effect on other parts of the system. (The name indicates the statistical conceivability that a group of butterflies flapping their wings in one part of the world could produce a storm in another hemisphere.)

But despite the thematic appropriateness of chaos theory, I am uneasy with Benitez-Rojo’s appropriation of it for the analysis of culture. Chaos theory, with its interest in the order of disorder, dabbles in the description of the most mystical of all natural forces: that which in spite of entropy, resists disorder. The end point of scientific chaos theory is a statistical science of wholeness, a goal that seems strikingly at odds with what is otherwise Benitez-Rojo’s confidence in the power of difference. Indeed, his steadfast belief that the cultural diversity of the islands is fully capable of resisting even the homogenizing effects of a postmodern global culture of consumerism is quite marked and controversial: “I see no solid reasons,” he writes, “to think that the culture of the Peoples of the Sea is negatively affected by the cultural ‘consumerism’ of the industrial societies. When a people’s culture conserves ancient dynamics that ‘play in a certain kind of way,’ these resist being displaced by external territorializing forms” (20).

Being more suspicious than Benitez-Rojo about the essential character of difference, I am nervous about the practice of once again using a Western science as a means of understanding the history of the colonized world; I worry about how his specific examination of Caribbean texts is sandwiched between discussions of chaos theory as if the Caribbean were some kind of real-world manifestation of Western empirical predictions. Of course, Benitez-Rojo insists that his use of Chaos theory remains on the level of metaphor: “If I have seized hold of certain models belonging to Chaos, it has not been because I think that these can manage to signify fully what’s there in the archipelago; rather it’s because they speak of dynamic forms that float, sometimes in unforeseen and scarcely perceptible ways within the Caribbean’s huge and heteroclitic archive” (269). But while he is interested in understanding the “certain way” of being–the ordering principle that characterizes the otherwise chaotic and disjointed Caribbean–surely even a thematic distinction must be made between that resistance to disorder that we call “culture” and the resistance to disorder that biologists often call “life” itself.

Benitez-Rojo’s tendency to understand the cultural specificity of the Caribbean as the product of a “natural” necessity, even while he treats literary texts as strictly social constructions, makes for a strange and troublesome discontinuity in his analysis. One can accept his basic stance on Caribbean literary texts, which, he says, propose “themselves as vehicles to drive the reader and the text to the marginal and ritually initiating territory of the absence of violence” (25). But his characterization of Caribbean culture is more difficult. The identification of the specificity of the culture, what he refers to throughout the book as the “certain kind of way” of the islands, is a highly naturalized, romantic, and even racist process. Thus when he depicts the moment in which he personally reached the age of reason, and understood in a single epiphany what it was to be Caribbean, as the day he witnessed two older Black woman “with an ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs” pass under his balcony in “a certain kind of way,” and that “I knew then at once there would be no apocalypse . . . the Caribbean is not an apocalyptic world” (10), he makes knowledge of the specifically Caribbean dependent on capturing Black women within a male gaze. To praise E. Duvergier de Hauranne’s understanding of the islands, he compliments Haurranne’s 19th-century traveller’s description of Black women walking through a market in Cuba. “It’s clear,” Benitez-Rojo insists, “that Huaranne, a foreigner, saw that these Negresses walked in ‘a certain kind of way,’ that they moved differently than European women” (79).

Perhaps it is unfair to expect Benitez-Rojo to transcend the racist sexism of his own cultural text. But these sections of the book are unsatisfactory in other ways as well. Again the terminology of chaos theory seems to impose itself rather awkwardly. Benitez-Rojo ends up describing the Planation as a “strange attractor”–in chaos lingo, a point of regularity within expected randomness (269). But the Planation is no strange attractor; it is the colonial machine in motion. And the exploitation that it has engendered is precisely not the result of natural distribution, as Benitez-Rojo himself suggests in his more Deleuzian moments. After all, he is no ethnographer, but a self-reflective and self-acknowledged product of the very Caribbean he describes, a student of culture doomed, as he discusses in his final chapter, to use alien tools of analysis. A generous reading might recall Benitez-Rojo’s own assertion that the Caribbean text attempts to “neutralize violence” by referring “society to the transhistorical codes of Nature” (17). But this reasoning away of racism is unsatisfactory, for one quickly recognizes that nowhere does Benitez-Rojo account for the ideological or social consequences of this or other particular constructions of Nature. The result is that the unstated mission of a truly Caribbean literature remains the naturalization of some, but not all, of the island’s people through the very act of representation. Thus, for example, when Benitez-Rojo critiques Nicolas Guillen’s poem “West Indes, Ltd,” his vague dissatisfaction that it is too Western appears as the critique that in it, “one does not feel the vital presence of the Negro’s desire” (129).

I do not mean to suggest that the troubling paradoxes of Benitez-Rojo’s practice should be cleanly resolved or contained. But his reluctance to chart the make-up of certain key social constructions leaves his work, for me at least, something less than a full engagement with the problematics of postmodernity. For there is often no compelling reason to assume that the fragmentation he enacts is really “postmodern” at all. He acknowledges that Caribbean discourse, like the islands themselves, “is in many respects prestructuralist and preindustrialist, and to make matters worse, a contrapuntal discourse that when seen a la Caribbean would look like a rumba, and when seen a la Europe like a perpetually moving baroque fugue, in which the voices meet once never to meet again” (23). And one of his recurring points is that even if postmodernism might provide a strategically interesting way of addressing Caribbean culture, within the postcolonial context, it will always remain an ill-fit. Yet I am not troubled by the presence of the premodern in the texts, social or literary, but by his description of his own methodology as postmodern. In the terms of classic Derridean symptomology, what is alarming is that Benitez-Rojo’s own postcritical methodology should produce text that so closely matches that of the precritical. “It’s no surprise,” he writes, “that the people of the Caribbean should be good boxers and also, of course, good musicians, good singers, good dancers, and good writers” (22). One wonders: did he need chaos, or even the Plantation, to perform these readings that stick, after all, fairly closely to the text? Perhaps not, but the methodological dynamic of the Plantation is evident in the progression of readings, where repetitions and difference do create a sense of the “endless combat that must necessarily remain undecided within the problematic interplay of confrontations, truces, alliances, derelictions, offensive and defensive strategies, advances and retreats, forms of domination, resistance and coexistence that the Plantation’s founding inscribed in the Caribbean” (111).

If I have expressed some serious reservations about this work, the daring with which it displays and enacts its own paradoxes makes it to my mind indispensable to the ongoing project of postmodern cultural studies. And while I have been critical of Benitez-Rojo’s use of the postmodern, perhaps he deserves the label all the more for his own awareness that for him, the postmodern is only an ill-fitting interim strategy with, finally, a single virtue: the “virtue of being the only [paradigm] to direct itself toward the play of paradoxes and eccentricities, of fluxes and displacements; that is, it offers possibilities that are quite in tune with those that define the Caribbean” (271). That Benitez-Rojo would be so restless with a paradigm of restlessness recommends him absolutely.

September 25, 2013
Sustainability and Critique
Philip E. Agre

Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
pagre@ucsd.edu

Wright, Will. Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Attend any public hearing about a local environmental controversy, and almost the first thing you’ll notice is a clash of contrasting discourses. Some participants, particularly from industry, will speak the language of technical reason: risk factors, powers of ten, bureaucratic procedures, the costs and benefits of industrial facilities. Many other participants, particularly from the communities around those facilities, will speak the language of experience and democracy: stories of past misfortune, fears about a world that doesn’t make sense to them, and the right to control their own lives (see Cone et al. 1992, Downey 1988, Gismondi and Richardson 1991, and Killingsworth and Steffens 1989). Beneath each discourse, typically, is a highly evolved practice of orchestrating or subverting the established mechanisms of social legitimation, as well as a worked-out view of scientific knowledge and its place in society. Community by community across the United States–and increasingly around the world–organizations such as the Chemical Manufacturers Association equip factory owners with rational arguments and soothing rhetoric at the same time as organizations such as the Citizens’ Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste equip community activists with coalition-building tactics and a nearly absolute rejection of experts and their expertise (Greider 1992). Immediately evident in these encounters is what we would be fully justified in calling a crisis of reason, occasioned in thousands of separate instances by concerns about the sustainability of industrial society.

This is the political background against which Will Wright has written his ambitious new book, Wild Knowledge. Wright’s goal is a critique and reconstruction of both scientific knowledge and institutional legitimation around the ecological imperative of sustainability. The fascination of Wright’s enterprise is immediately apparent: understanding and practicing the notion of sustainable society requires us to reopen some long-standing and painful questions about the relation between society and nature. In what sense are human beings part of nature? To what extent is human history conditioned by natural history, and what role does human history play in the biological and physical evolution of the earth? Wright’s concern is not the substantive answers to these questions–he does not assess the reality of global warming, much less the utility of any given regulatory approach to preventing it. Instead, he wishes to dig deeply into the concepts of humanity and nature in order simply to make intelligible the notion of a social-natural history (cf. Cronon 1991), and in particular the notion of sustainability as an attribute and a goal of social action.

His book defies classification. If it stands in any single tradition, it is the feminist and otherwise radical critique of science by authors such as Merchant (1980) and Easlea (1980). Although it is reasonably lucid and self-contained, it will probably not be appreciated by anybody who is not already sympathetic to such ideas; for example, one must pretty much accept a priori that science and technology, as a mindset, are the cause of our environmental problems–and not, in particular, the cure for them. His book is not a work of historical or otherwise empirical inquiry, but rather a wholly–even austerely–conceptual analysis. And although it addresses central issues of social theory, its treatment of that tradition is shaky, as will become clear in a moment. Nonetheless, Wright’s book is important and challenging, and required reading for anybody with a conceptual interest in environmentalism as social practice.

Let us now consider Wright’s argument in roughly the order in which he presents it. His point of departure is the argument in his previous book, The Social Logic of Health (1982), in which he points out that the notion of “health” transcends the bounds of any particular scientific-medical theory of disease, and as such stands as the always-available social-natural grounds for contesting the legitimacy of medical institutions and their practices and expertise. Alternative health-care practitioners (midwives, acupuncturists, herbalists, and others) may not have an easy time acquiring official sanction for their activities, but they do have, in discursive and social terms, somewhat solid ground for demanding it. Wright’s method is to extend this argument to environmental issues, with “sustainability” playing the same role as “health.” Like “health,” “sustainability” deeply intertwines “social” and “natural” issues. Indeed in many areas, such as occupational health, the two concerns combine, bringing biology and politics into much greater proximity than either of them is, at present, capable of acknowledging.

Wright argues that scientific and social knowledge are artificially distinct categories, and that they are indeed actually incoherent unless conceived as continuous with one another. The critical issue for Wright is language– the language within which science, technology, religion, and social theory are framed and through which social institutions are legitimated. Science in particular has, since Descartes and Newton, understood itself as speaking a special, mathematical language. As a result, the scientist, qua subject of scientific inquiry, understands knowledge as the asocial, ahistorical mathematical representation of reality. All the same, Wright observes that when scientists and philosophers are called upon to provide some justification for science, they appeal to its “success” in technological terms. But the religions of traditional cultures have their own kind of success, namely success in sustaining the social-natural relations by means of which these cultures reproduce themselves in their natural settings. These two types of success are complementary: industrial technology has not proven sustainable, and religious worldviews have been unable to make room for the benefits of technical innovation.

This is a good point to stop and listen to Wright’s own prose, whose style is of a piece with the nature of his project:

Both religion and science have incorporated a fundamental reference to language into their respective ideas of knowledge, implicitly recognizing that knowledge is inherently an issue of the formal structure of language. But both have distorted that formal reference, interpreting it instead as a substantive appeal to a particular form of language, and so referring the idea of knowledge to a sacred, magical form of language rather than to the formal structure of language. For religion this magical language has always been the ordinary, traditional language of daily life, where knowledge of the magical words gives knowledge of the sacred social-natural order, with its necessary moral commitments to traditional acceptance and ritual. And for science this magical language is mathematics, where the magic of perfect observation gives knowledge of the external natural order, with its necessary technical commitments to individualized criticism and efficiency.(112-13)

Many readers may demur; exactly what kinds of science and, more importantly, what kinds of religion are supposed to fall within these generalizations? Does Wright subscribe to the outdated anthropological stereotype of traditional cultures as uncritical and ahistorical? It is hard to tell. Throughout the book, words like “science,” “religion,” “language,” “legitimation,” “sustainability,” “nature,” and “reality” recur constantly without ever being fully unpacked into a definite embedding in a disciplinary practice or literature, much less a concrete empirical reference. The book is composed in sentences of thirty-odd words organized into long paragraphs, each of which systematically develops a definite point involving a particular set of the book’s key words. The effect sometimes resembles Buddhist scripture, with a hypnotically unfolded internal consistency which could easily be mistaken for a verbal game unless it is applied in the context of an actual practice.

But let us continue. To motivate the underlying politics of scientific knowledge, Wright recounts the by-now familiar early history of science understood as mathematical observation and knowledge. Early theories of gravity, for example, were consciously understood in their day as positions in a political contest. Although the concrete political reference of these theories has fallen away, the politics of scientific subjectivity remain. Wright’s argument for the incoherence of this form of subjectivity turns on the notion of “mathematical observation”:

For science knowledge is an issue of the observing human mind, and yet the human mind is typically influenced by social and cultural ideas, ideas that involve values and beliefs and that are not strictly and neutrally derived from objective nature. Thus scientific observation must establish a neutral and objective connection between mind and nature, a connection systematically purged of all contaminating social influences. . . . Such an objective connection can be made through observation, but only through a special kind of observation, a kind that is uniquely focused on nature and without social content. This is mathematical observation, the only kind of observation that can directly connect the rational mind with objective nature. Mathematics is found to be the special, necessary lens through which nature must be observed, since nature is defined as being exactly a structure of mathematical entities and relations. . . . For scientific knowledge, then, the idea of the mind is connected with the idea of nature through the idea of mathematics. . . . The mind must become mathematical if it is to achieve valid knowledge, and so the idea of objective nature imposes a mathematical structure on the scientific image of human beings, as the detached, receptive subjects of scientific knowledge.(75)

Given the impossibility of actually attaining these direct correspondences between a purified mathematical mind and a manifest mathematical world, Wright refers to this notion of mathematical observation as a kind of magic, comparable rhetorically if not logically to the magical systems of traditional religions. But this argument goes by too quickly. Many scientists would object that Wright’s notion of mathematical observation elides the whole substance of actual scientific practice based on experiments and replication. The point is not that experiment directly observes the mathematics of nature, only that it allows for defeasible inference of it, subject to replication and extension of the results by others in similarly equipped laboratories elsewhere–perhaps in wholly different cultures. Wright’s proposed alternative, that

human beings must be conceptualized as having a formally necessary but substantively contingent relationship with their world, a relationship through which knowledge is always formally possible but also always possibly mistaken (173)

is more or less what scientists refer to as the “falsifiability” of theories. But Wright is not mistaken, exactly; the point is that he is not so much presenting an argument as referring to one that has been made with greater thoroughness by a variety of authors, for example Latour (1987), who conceive of physical phenomena not as independent realities objectively glimpsed, nor as idealist entities arbitrarily constructed, but as conjoint social-natural entities stabilized in highly organized social-natural settings.

Beyond this internal claim against the coherence of scientific subjectivity, Wright follows numerous other authors by appealing to the reintroduction of consciousness into physical theorizing by quantum mechanics. But here again he is moving too quickly, inasmuch as the long-established and newly resurgent “many worlds” model of quantum phenomena (Everett 1957; cf. Drescher 1991) accounts for the evidence without giving any special role to consciousness or treating observation as anything but another form of physical interaction.

Wright’s complaint, in short, is that the mathematical language within which scientific knowledge is framed deprives that knowledge of its human qualities: its social embedding; its historical specificity; its reference to broader human concerns, particularly the concern for the social-natural sustainability of human social and technical practices; and its susceptibility to critique on these grounds. Whatever the difficulties in his argument for this point, his proposed solution is altogether intriguing: scientific knowledge, he feels, should be reunderstood as a matter of human beings saying things in human language –not an artificially restricted mathematical subtype of language, but language as such, in the fullness of its rhetorical, political, and historical character. He would have us attend to the language of environmental discourse, taking this language seriously as culture and as political practice foundedly ultimately on the value of sustainability (cf. Killingsworth 1992, Wynne 1987).

In this view, he follows in a long tradition that understands language as the essence of humanity, in the sense that languages carry cultural modes of cognition within them, transcending particular individuals and providing for the continuity of cultural traditions through their role in individual socialization. Indeed, Wright overstates the originality of his argument in this regard. Consider, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language (see Brown 1967), from which a great deal of modern linguistics and anthropology has descended. Humboldt held that human languages have a significant degree of autonomy from their speakers inasmuch as those speakers have only a limited formal understanding of how their language works. Furthermore, he held that languages develop in two clear stages. The first stage corresponds to the founding period of any given nation, during which the people collectively evolve a language suited to the trials of making a living from their particular landscape. Once that language acquires a stable form, the second period begins as that form starts to solidify; rather than being improvised to suit the functional needs of productive work, it is now handed down intact as an organically interconnected system of autonomous linguistic forms. For the philologists in Humboldt’s Germany, this theory motivated the project of reconstructing ancient modes of consciousness through the figurative spadework of historical linguistics. Language was ecological, tied to the earth, in the sense that it developed as an organic part of the ancient nation’s sustainable natural-social relations to its local geography and ecology.

To be sure, Wright’s theory differs from Humboldt’s in a variety of ways. Wright’s social-ecological project is not nostalgic; his argument for sustainability does not require that we revert to lost folkways. Quite the contrary, sustainability is to be achieved through two requirements: that institutional legitimation be continually referred to consciously formulated understandings of sustainability; and that this reference be endlessly open to contest and critique. He wishes knowledge to become “wild” in the sense of being formally open to this kind of unbounded critique. In particular, Wright’s theory, unlike that of the German tradition from Herder down to Gadamer, is not hermeneutic: the key to sustainability is not locked away in language but rather articulated in institutional legitimation and critique. Nonetheless, he greatly underestimates the extent to which cultural theory has struggled with the relationship between culture and technical reason (see Sahlins 1976).

What is more, Wright also underestimates the struggles of social theorists to reconcile nature and culture (for the particularly fascinating case of Lukacs see Feenberg 1986), and in so doing to formulate simultaneously adequate conceptions of both individual agency and social organization:

Through [its various accounts] of individual motivations, social theory created different strategies for social legitimation and social explanation. In all of these versions social theory has accepted the scientific version of objective nature, as the valid basis for reason and knowledge, and thus social theory has revolved around the idea of the autonomous scientific individual. Because this individual is logically asocial but empirically social, social theory has generally focused on the relationship between the individual and the society, with the individual being in various stages of tension and conflict with society. This tension is inevitable, and it makes social order somewhat problematic, at least theoretically. This is the famous problem of social order: individuals "are naturally" free and society imposes external constraints on them, constraints that both inhibit freedom and enable individual rationality, fulfillment, and so on. (134-35)

This formulation oversimplifies through its ascription to “social theory” of an altogether regressive “scientific” theory of individual subjectivity. The fact is that theorists such as Elias (1982 [1939]; cf. Mennell 1989) have invested great effort in overcoming such distinctions. The anthropological conception of culturally specific consciousness is already a considerable departure from the “scientific” individual, and the theories of embodied social practice of Elias, Bourdieu, and others go further. Nonetheless, deep difficulties do remain. Wright proposes to resolve them through an appeal to language as the formal matrix of institutional legitimation. In reducing social order to questions of legitimation, he faces a considerable challenge.

But he is nothing if not courageous. He sees a deep connection between language as the locus of human sociality and sustainability as the goal of human institutions. Inasmuch as social action, sustainable or otherwise, is organized at a trans-individual level through the framework of language, he views language itself as providing for its own perpetuation through the formal conditions it establishes for the simultaneous conduct of legitimation and critique.

[L]anguage is more about involved mediating and surviving than about detached representing and mirroring. . . . language necessarily structures the way we think about ourselves and our world, since language is actively striving to sustain its own possibility, through human knowledge and actions. . . . language can sustain itself, actively, only through the organizing and legitimation of social institutions, which means through versions of knowledge and reason as legitimating, organizing endeavors. (179)

Knowledge serves the formal goal of language, the goal of sustaining the social-natural possibility of language through organized, legitimated human actions. . . . Language must be seen as formally directing human actions, through efforts at knowledge, toward its inherent, formal goal, the goal of sustaining the possibility of such human actions. (187)

[I]ndividuals would be understood as formally motivated by language, where language, unlike scientific nature, is already understood as participating in this formal, goal-oriented structure, and thus they would be understood as motivated by the same formal mechanisms that generate knowledge, social life, and social legitimation. Individuals would be understood as formally motivated to act in such a way as to sustain their own human possibility, the possibility of social life. (188)

In other words, Wright’s point is not that human language directly encodes sustainable productive practices–except perhaps in traditional cultures, which however are unable to accommodate significant environmental shifts due to the inflexibility of this encoding and the religious delegitimation of critique. On the contrary, his point is that language provides the formal resources with which conscious human beings, by their very nature as social and therefore linguistic beings, are able to legitimate and criticize institutions by appealing to the imperative of sustainability.

The precise protocol by which legitimation and criticism must proceed, though, is unclear. Perhaps the appeal to sustainability must be mediated by some general account of truth:

Specific cultural actions must be legitimated in terms of conceptions of "truth" and "reality," but the validity of these conceptions must in turn be evaluated in terms of the formal criteria of sustainability.(193)

It seems implausible, however, that a conception of truth and reality could itself determine whether a system of social practices is sustainable. So perhaps it is also permissible to appeal to sustainability directly:

The reference for all issues of legitimacy would be sustainability, and thus the only legitimate criticisms would be those that could argue for or demonstrate ecological failures on the part of the established practices.(210)

But this position cannot be entirely right either, given the likelihood that several institutional orders might be ecologically sustainable in a given historical situation, and that of those institutional orders would be enormously preferable to others on non-ecological grounds.

Be this as it may, Wright does not prescribe any particular set of institutions but rather an unfolding history in which institutions lose their legitimacy through social-natural shifts in the practical conditions of sustainability. He says that

actions that are legitimate under certain social-natural conditions may not be legitimate under later, changed social-natural conditions, conditions that result from the effects of those legitimated actions.(193-94)

Shifts in the conditions of sustainability presumably also include exogenous environmental changes, scientific discoveries about eco-social system dynamics, and technological innovations. In any case, periods of institutional legitimacy through sustainable practices alternate with periods in which this legitimacy is lost and newly appropriate institutions arise. Note that this is not a particularly materialistic theory of history; the social effectivity of accurate understandings of sustainability is more or less assumed.

Moreover, the periodic institutional shifts are understood, strikingly, in terms of forms of individual identity. In particular, institutions themselves are largely understood in terms of the dimensions of social difference (race, gender, class, sexuality, et cetera) that these institutions recognize. The established institutions of any given period will reckon insider/outsider distinctions in particular terms. Although dissent as such would always be valued as such, the established distinctions of a given period will find their justification in the social-natural facts of sustainability.

Although Wright presents this prospect optimistically as the formal celebration of difference, I think that it inadvertently identifies one of the profound dilemmas in environmental thinking. He says, for example,

In this conception the idea of equality refers to an institutional guarantee, in the name of rationality, that all individuals can maintain effective local control over their chosen lives, and that any disruption of that local control must be legitimated in the name of a shared ecological rationality.(217)

This may sound reasonable, but its flip side does not: if the sustainability of social practices provides their ultimate justification, then it also provides the ultimate justification for whatever marginalization–or even outright oppression–these practices might entail. I can easily imagine someone arguing that toleration of homosexuality, for example, is inconsistent with ecological sustainability.

Can this be right? The difficulty, I would conjecture, lies in Wright’s implicit model of social institutions. Wright, as I have remarked, differs from Humboldt and the rest of the anthropological tradition is that he locates social identity in language as such and not in particular languages. Differences among people, likewise, are not understood as culturally specific but as universal. Such a view effectively suppresses cultural difference and thereby eliminates the possibility of geniune “otherness” among human beings and their respective forms of knowledge (see, for example, Grossberg 1988: 382).

In the end, Wright’s model of institutional legitimation, shaped in the image of our “global” environmental difficulties, is “global” itself. Society itself becomes, in one sense or another, one large institution:

[T]he social order must be seen, formally, as an organization, or metaorganization, with its own inherent, formal goal, and that legitimating critical access is the only organizational strategy that is rational and ecological.(213)

But in the real world of 1992, the legitimation of global institutions for the regulation of putatively sustainable practices has very little to do with democracy, or indeed with genuine sustainability The Ecologist 1992). The challenge for an argument such as Wright’s, in my view, is to unpack the notion of “institutions” and their legitimation in a way that recognizes the diversity not only of individuals but of local forms of knowledge.

References
- Brown, Roger Langham. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
- Cone, Kathy, Luis Quinones, Robert Salter, Brian Shields, Luis Torres, and Janice Varela. “The language of land-use conflict: New Mexicans talk about public lands, environmentalists, and ‘People for the West!’” The Workbook 17 (1), Spring 1992: 2-6.
- Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.
- Downey, Gary L. “Structure and practice in the cultural identities of scientists: Negotiating nuclear wastes in New Mexico.” Anthropological Quarterly 61 (1) 1988: 26-38.
- Drescher, Gary. “Demystifying quantum mechanics: A simple universe with quantum uncertainty.” Complex Systems 5, 1991: 207-237.
- Easlea, Brian. Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution 1450-1750. Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
- The Ecologist 22 (4), July/August 1992. A special issue entitled Whose Common Future?.
- Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Originally published in German in 1939.
- Everett, Hugh. “`Relative state’ formulation of quantum mechanics.” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, 1957: 454-469.
- Feenberg, Andrew. Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
- Gismondi, Michael, and Mary Richardson. “Discourse and power in environmental politics: Public hearings on a bleached kraft pulp mill in Alberta Canada.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 2 (3), 1991: 43-66.
- Greider, William. Who Will Tell the People?: The Betrayal of American Democracy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
- Grossberg, Lawrence. “Wandering audiences, nomadic critics.” Cultural Studies 2 (3), 1988: 377-391.
- Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Dean Steffens. “Effectiveness in the environmental impact statement.” Written Communication 6 (2), 1989: 155-180.
- Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
- Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers and Scientists Through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
- Mennell, Stephen. Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
- Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.
- Sahlins, Marshall. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
- Wright, Will. The Social Logic of Health. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982.
- Wynne, Brian. Risk Management and Hazardous Waste: Implementation and the Dialectics of Credibility. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987.
September 25, 2013
Consuming Megalopolis

Jon Thompson

Department of English
North Carolina State University

Celeste Olalquiaga. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Even while proclaiming an interest in the vast and gaudy landscape of kitsch rejected by high culture, a good deal of postmodern criticism remains highly theoretical, committed to analyzing written texts and content to refer to the world of mass culture rather than actually study it. One of the strengths of Celeste Olalquiaga’s Megalopolis is that it investigates a wide variety of contemporary practices, many of them invisible to less perceptive eyes, seeing them all as social texts that say much about contemporary existence. Megalopolis is written in a clear, often lyrical style that finds its inspiration in the weird but compelling landscape of postmodernity, a landscape of telephone sex advertisements, malls, docudramas, SF movies Blade Runner and RoboCop, but also low-budget 50’s and 60’s futuristic fantasies), AT&T advertisement campaigns, comic books, cyborgs, World Fairs, Latin American or Latino home altars, snuff films, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, Brazilian carnival parades and the Chilean punk subculture.

Given her thesis that we are living in the ruins of modernity, and that identity and history, as traditionally understood, have virtually ceased to exist, Olalquiaga ranges across this “culturescape” of fear and loathing and desire with considerable authority and aplomb. Yet her argument is not primarily negative. Against those who have argued that postmodernity is a kind of endlessly recurring capitalistic nightmare, she sees other possibilities. Central to her argument is the practice of consumption. To Olalquiaga, consumption has been a misunderstood activity, wrongly associated with passivity, unfreedom and tyranny, making the human subject an object worked upon by the imperatives of capitalism. It is this notion of consumption that Olalquiaga wants to rehabilitate:

Avoiding a rationale for consumption based on functionality (that is on possible use), postmodernism sponsors consumption as an autonomous practice. . . . The purpose of this book is to describe how such an apparently finite project as postmodernism, understood as the glorification of consumption, does in fact enable the articulation of novel and contradictory experiences."(xvii)

Running through her analyses of contemporary practices, whether they are Latino home altars or low-budget SF movies, is this pivotal point: in a world dominated by the corporate message that commodities make the man, consumption can be an ironic activity, even an ironic mode of self-consciousness. If done right, consumption can involve a recognition of commodity fetishism itself, and thus a recognition of the entire way in which capitalism as a system attempts to co-opt and control subjects.

This argument is extended across five brief, but suggestive, chapters. Chapter one, “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” examines the fate of the body in postmodern societies. Despite the cult of the body in the West, Olalquiaga contends that what we are witnessing is not its triumphant deification, but instead its demise, what she calls “the vanishing body.” State-of-the-art projective technology (videos, TV, computers, etc.), postmodern architecture, hi-tech prosthetics, the ongoing fascination with cyborgs, AIDS, and of course electronic sex: for Olalquiaga, all of these developments point to the inescapable condition of “psychasthenia,” or the inability of an organism to locate the boundaries of its own body. The fragmentation and disappearance of the body means that increasingly, identity is not dependent upon organic being.

This case is further developed in Chapter two, “Lost in Space,” in which Olalquiaga argues that the technology of instant communication precipitates the loss of temporal continuity: “The postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication, transforms urban culture into a gigantic hologram capable of producing any image within an apparent void” (19). Quite literally, then, the body is lost in space. One symptom of this near disembodiment is the space age iconography of the 50s and 60s, and its recent “reincarnation” in retro fashion. Whereas once this space-age iconography expressed some hope in regards to technology and its effects, the postmodern version is ironic at best. Retro fashion now is “a parodic attempt to breach some contemporary fears, most notably the replacement of the organic and human by the technological” (34).

In Chapter three, “Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from the Street,” Olalquiaga turns her gaze to religious kitsch, particularly the religious kitsch that has been recycled by artists. This raw material is not merely faddish, but is instead used to fashion artistic artifacts that sacralize the secular and replace a transcendental emphasis with a political one (for example, the sanctification of contemporary femininity). For Olalquiaga, this “colonization of religious imagery” (53) does not involve a domestication of either its ethnicity or its politics. Rather, “the absorbed invades the appropriating system and begins to constitute and transform it” (53). Thus “Holy Kitschen” symbolizes the transformative possibilities of all marginal elements absorbed into appropriated systems.

Chapter four, “Nature Morte,” performs an autopsy, as it were, upon the postmodern fascination with melancholy, corpses, ruins, decay. Examining a variety of artistic practices (photography, dioramas, multimedia exhibits, fiction, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, and fake science exhibits), Olalquiaga explores the ways in which the bizarre and the grotesque allow for the recovery of a sense of death that is lost to our culture. Yet this melancholic aspect of postmodernism is not elegiac: “More than a lamentation for what is lost, this melancholic sensibility is deeply embedded in the intensity of the loss–not seeking to reconstitute what is gone, but to rejoice in its impossibility” (58). As a self-conscious form of naturalism, this nature morte aesthetic recognizes deadliness as the only coherent expression of postmodern experience, and thus exposes the reifying effects of “deadly discourses” (69), that is, the discourses or systems that pretend to an objective status.

If postmodernity has become a kind of giant, grotesque mortuary, as Olalquiaga suggests in Chapter four, this vision receives considerable qualification in her fifth Chapter, “Tupincopolis: The City of Retrofuturistic Indians.” The primary object of analysis here is “Tupincopolis,” a Brazilian carnival parade exhibit of an imaginary retrofuturistic Indian metropolis, a cross between the exoticism and flamboyance of Indian primitivism and the postmodernism associated with the world of Japanese high-technology. What interests Olalquiaga is the way in which the composition of elements within the parade works to humorously carnivalize both postmodernism and primitivism. The parade thus comes to represent the “third world’s” creative re-accentuation of “first world” ideology, particularly its mythical identification with technology-as-progress and its persistent mythologizing of Latin Americans as primitive. Tupincopolis, then, provides a paradigm for cultural change in the postmodern age. Rejecting models of cultural change that emphasize imposition, Olalquiaga maintains that cultural change is not “a matter of simple vertical imposition or ransacking, but is rather an intricate horizontal movement of exchange” (76).

In one sense, Megalopolis can be read as a sustained meditation on the failure of modernity and the cultural mutations that are filling its void within postmodernity. Olalquiaga elaborates this position by developing a number of related themes throughout the book. Like Baudrillard, Olalquiaga privileges the notion of simulation. Where modernity depended upon the notion of contexts, of objects and events seen and understood within specific and recognizable environments, postmodernism collapses the boundaries between reality and representation. “Intertextuality” replaces “indexicality”: “Simulation here will be understood as the establishment of intertextuality instead of indexicality. In other words, rather than pointing to first-degree references (objects, events) simulation looks at representations of them (images, texts) for verisimilitude” (6). Within postmodernity, subjects live their lives at a second remove: things tend to be lived through representation rather than directly. Experience comes to us now as highly encoded, increasingly available only through electronic representation; yet this vicariousness is experienced as real.

Megalopolis describes a world in which an image culture shatters the verbal culture of modernity, reconstituting “language” and power hierarchies. Artificiality and extreme emotion fill in, or more accurately, become substitutes for the relentless allusiveness and emptiness of this decontextulized, thoroughly intertextual world. In a world deprived of affect, the postmodern sensibility “continually searches for intense thrills and for the acute emotionality attributed to other times and peoples” (40). Images, icons, styles, and subcultures are endlessly recycled. For Olalquiaga, postmodernism becomes personified as a sort of thief. Like its production-less economies which reassemble rather than produce, it filches, pilfers, and steals. Postmodern culture is thus vicarious, voyeuristic, cannibalistic, and at times, “melancholic” (to the extent that it is doomed to merely repeat the styles and icons associated with a modernist culture). Space age retro, for example, “provides the melancholic parody” (34) of the cold efficiency of a high-tech existence. While one may wonder if “melancholic parody” is an oxymoron or is, as she suggests, a necessary way of coping with cultural fears and anxieties, Olalquiaga wants to make another point: to her, the endless circulation of simulations suggests that cultural imagery is endlessly adaptable to new contexts and desires–and this ability is to be celebrated rather than simply mourned as a sign of the loss of cultural specificity. And it is this emphasis on self-conscious, knowing celebration that defines for Olalquiaga postmodernity’s finest achievement as it continues on in the ruins of modernity.

In the final analysis, it is difficult not to agree with Olalquiaga’s micro readings, many of which are brilliant in their sheer interpretive power. Disagreeing is doubly difficult inasmuch as from the very first page she explicitly allies herself with, and celebrates, illusions, inconsistency, and contradictions as inescapable facts of postmodern life. Yet it seems to me that Olalquiaga’s theoretical argument is vitiated by its hyperbolic rhetoric. (“If the fragmentation of contemporary identity is reproduced in referential absence and the pleasures of pain are induced by a pornographic technology, it should come as no surprise that the body has been rendered totally vulnerable” [10].) All too often a particular truth is generalized into the universal condition: bodies are already cyborgs, cities are the wastelands of modernity (what of the cities that are not romantically ruinous?), the nature morte aesthetic describes the deadliness and decadence of postmodern existence (at least in the U.S. and Europe) in which subjects are compliant bodies, “not seeking to reconstitute what is gone” (58), embracing the impossibility of physical or cultural integrity, happily adrift in the detritus of obsolescent technology. Olalquiaga’s argument for a creative consumerism is suggestive, but in its unqualified form it comes perilously close to suggesting that shopping can be redemptive, that shopping is itself a kind of postmodern heaven. To this reader anyway, the notion of creative consumption as a way of life or end seems limiting, since no matter how the commodity is revalued, the socio-economic system that delimits the horizons of so many remains in place (not to mention the fact that many people simply cannot afford the acts of creative consumption Olalquiaga valorizes). After carnival, the disenfranchised go back to whatever lives they led before carnival.

In its widest extension, this point may be elucidated by examining the title of the book. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. The blurb on the back of the paperback edition glosses megalopolis as “the biggest of cities, but also a city in ruins”; yet the subtitle, “Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities,” points to a broader base of experience, one unrestricted by urban experience. Olalquiaga’s argument is comprised of a good many claims which undergo this same slippage–claims which have their basis in the urban experience but quickly become indicative of contemporary existence, everywhere. Time and again, her rhetoric transforms insights true of many North American and European cities, and their cultures, into general statements about the human condition at large. Because of their seemingly universal scope, these statements can command, at best, qualified assent. “Between a future in ruins and a past that is but a costume for another personification,” writes Olalquiaga, “contemporary culture is stuck in an allegorical present, unable to return nostalgically to the past or advance hopefully into the future” (35). Is all of contemporary society really stuck in this cultural time-warp? And is Brazil’s “good” postmodernism (its carnivalization of hi-tech postmodernism) the only truly viable alternative? Is our world really one megalopolis? Is the entire world really enmeshed in, critically or otherwise, Olalquiaga’s postmodernist illusions? To my mind, Olalquiaga uncovers the questions crucial to any serious analysis of contemporary culture, but she doesn’t always answer them.

Despite these limitations, few books can compare with Megalopolis‘s trenchant, lucid, and sensitive readings of Western urban cultures, and the practices and structures of feeling that constitute them. Like the best science fiction, a form repeatedly invoked by Olalquiaga, Megalopolis changes the way you think about contemporary urban culture.

September 25, 2013
Deuteronomy Comix
Stuart Moulthrop

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
sm51@prism.gatech.edu

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. Bantam Spectra, 1992. 440 pp. $10.00 paperbound.

Late in his critique of the cyberpunk vogue, Andrew Ross turns his attention to what may be its ultimate expression–Cyberpunk: the Role-Playing Game. Here, he suggests, we may find the national pastime and true mythology of Cyberpunks-in-Boy’s- Town, a socializing ritual for aspiring dystopians. “The structure of the game,” Ross observes, represents “an efficient response to the cyberpunk view of survivalism in a future world where the rules have already been written in the present. True to the adaptational educational thinking from which roleplaying games evolved, the education of desire proceeds through learning and interpreting the rules of the play, not by changing them” (160). The game of Cyberpunk, as Ross sees it, offers not the differance of deconstruction, not the paralogies of postmodern science, not even the “euretics” of an Age of Video. It promises a new world order that looks suspiciously familiar, a bored fast-forward into a “future” that is actually a repeat loop grafted neatly onto the past.

Yet as Ross points out, William Gibson’s own myth of artistic origins stands at odds with this circularity. In an early short story, “The Gernsback Continuum,” Gibson’s protagonist suffers semiotic hauntings, visions not so much from Spiritus Mundi as off the covers of Amazing Stories. Much like the nation itself in the grip of Reaganoma, Gibson’s sufferer finds himself caught in a pernicious revision of history. His 1980 is steadily replaced by another 1980, one that seems to have been projected from 1925. He finds himself falling into the American future imagined by his grandparents, a world of flying-wing airliners, shark-finned bubble cars, and perfect Aryan citizens of Tomorrowland. The only thing that saves the poor man from complete psychic collapse is dystopian therapy: a crash diet of pornographic video and hardcore journalism, which reminds him that the utopian visions of science fiction’s Golden Age have no claim upon the world as we know it.

If we can read “The Gernsback Continuum” as an origin story for cyberspace fiction, then this kind of writing seems to set itself against the old utopian project of science fiction, insisting that we move not “back to the future” but instead (as the New Wave once had it) straight on from the confounded present. Novels like Gibson’s Neuromancer, Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, and Rudy Rucker’s Wetware describe social upheavals triggered by rampant extension of current technological development. They thus offer an important corrective to the militarist saga-mongering of Star Wars and other forms of recycled space opera. Yet the cultural politics of science fiction do not arrange themselves in neat dialectical patterns. The utopianism of the Gernsback era had its moment of sincerity before it was commandeered by Hollywood jingoes; and as Ross demonstrates, the dystopian refusal of the cyberpunks turns all too easily into an apology for the military-entertainment complex.

This seems clear in what may be the culmination of the cyberspace project, Gibson and Sterling’s alternate history novel, The Difference Engine. Though these writers had earlier fled the Gernsback Continuum, in this work they fall headlong into the clutches of a far more evil empire, Great Britain’s circa 1855. In the world of The Difference Engine, Lord Byron has somehow avoided exile and death at Missolonghi, and under his dictatorship the Industrial Radical party has set up a savantocracy using gear-driven mechanical computers for panoptic social control. As an exploration of “difference” on the level of technics, the book is admirable. But in its very project The Difference Engine falls back into the same mode retro which the younger Gibson once condemned. Ursula LeGuin remarked a long time ago on the affinity of certain American science fiction writers for the ethos of the British Raj. Fleets of battle cruisers, voyages of discovery and conquest, the inhuman Other: all are fetishes of the 19th century transferred to the 21st or beyond. In their own way, Gibson and Sterling take us back to that racist, jingoist “future” at full steam; and of course this reversion is entirely consistent with the dystopian logic of cyberpunk. The Difference Engine moves to the rhythms of Catastrophism, that nastiest form of Darwinian theory which argues that natural (or social) history consists of punctuated equilibriums. According to this doctrine, all organisms and organizations follow a sequence running from irruption through expansion to apocalypse. All things must pass, suddenly and dramatically. We thus leave the Gernsback Continuum only to end up in Darwin Land, an imaginary space where chaos and autopoeisis replace any vision of social or human potential.

It may be that all attempts to imagine the future launch us inevitably back into the past; all our engines of difference may work toward the same purpose, namely the justification of class and economic interests on which technophile culture depends. Yet the concept of cyberspace–a social order founded on broadband communication, hypertextual ediscourse, and systematic simulation– suggests at least the possibility of a genuine cultural divergence. In the final analysis Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash does not deliver on this vision any better than earlier works of its kind; but if The Difference Engine represents the fruition of the cyberspace/cyberpunk enterprise, then Snow Crash may represent a limit case. This is a novel in which cyberpunk very nearly becomes something more interesting.

In his epilogue, Stephenson explains that Snow Crash was originally intended as a graphic novel or upscale comic book, though it changed during its development into a more traditional print product. Yet in at least one sense of the phrase, Stephenson’s novel is indeed a comic book: that is, its main narrative concern lies with the struggle of Hiro Protagonist and his sometime ally Y. T. (for “Yours Truly”) against the sinister machinations of an Evil Emperor Wannabe, one L. Bob Rife. Mr. Rife, who seems to amalgamate H. L. Hunt, L. Ron Hubbard, and H. Ross Perot (with hints of Bob Dobbs and Fu Manchu), aspires to World Domination. But this is by way of afterthought, since his first priority is control of information:

When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control information no matter where it is--on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads.(108)

L. Bob Rife, “Lord of Bandwidth” (who sounds chillingly like Perot in this passage), has made the ultimate cybernetic connection between “the animal and the machine,” as Norbert Wiener used to say. If information is proprietary, and if he can control it on his company’s hard disks, then why shouldn’t he be able to secure it in his programmers’ heads? It turns out that L. Bob has perfected a technology for turning human brains into the equivalent of hard disks, using a virus that restructures the cerebellum. So the epos of Snow Crash unfolds (at least initially) as a straightforward Manichaean contest between the champions of free discourse and the conspirators of mind control. Like all the cyberspace novels, its main theatre of operations is the cybernetic frontier, the interface between mechanical information systems and the human mind.

But it would be unfair to describe Snow Crash as just another superhero/supervillain faceoff, even though it unabashedly tells the story of how our Hiro saves the world. Snow Crash is “comic” in another sense as well. Like Gibson and Sterling, Stephenson conjures up a post-traumatic world order. The setting for Snow Crash is a postnational, postrational America, a chaosmos of strip malls and housing developments known as “burbclaves.” But these entities differ radically from the suburbs of today. After the de facto collapse of the U.S. government (for reasons never stated but easy enough to guess), the nation fragments into Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs), which are suburban city-states functioning as sovereign countries: The Mews At Windsor Heights, The Heights at Bear Run, Cinnamon Grove, New South Africa. In Stephenson’s world, the post-cold-war collapse of communism has generalized into a global implosion of community. Here one’s social allegiances lie not with governments but with franchises. Police and judicial services are provided by chain outfits (MetaCops Unlimited; Judge Bob’s Judicial System) and defense becomes the purview of corporate mercenaries (General Jim’s Defense System, Admiral Bob’s National Security). The Mafia handles pizza delivery. Individual citizens affiliates with their chosen burbclaves. Hiro carries the bar- coded passport of the original meta-nation, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, enabling him to seek asylum in any of thousands of convenient locations worldwide.

This vision of the near future has its shadowy sides, but unlike Gibson and Sterling, Stephenson eschews the darkness of film noir in favor of black humor. Snow Crash may be the first genuinely funny cyberpunk novel, invested with the same dire zaniness that animates Dr. Strangelove, Gravity’s Rainbow, andElektra Assassin. Stephenson has Kubrick’s eye for the absurdity of terror weapons, Pynchon’s knack for turning jokes into profundities (and back again), and Miller and Sienkiewicz’s taste for apocalyptic dementia. His comic genius puts him on a par with all these worthies. Yet Stephenson’s black humor has been upgraded for the new world order, in which the focus of evil is not a General Ripper, Captain Blicero, or Colonel Fury (who have been displaced by General Jim and Admiral Bob) but L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, keeper of the information highway. The application to our times seems clear enough. Now that we no longer have to fear the Bomb quite so much, we can try to stop worrying and love the NREN.

It might be appealing to read Snow Crash as self-satire or camp, a novel of liberation that liberates us from the pretentiousness of liberation novels. Stephenson’s main inventive principle does seem to be a species of irony. We might call it metastasis, a trope of displacement that sets everything in the book beside itself. “Meta” worlds abound in Snow Crash: an Afrocentric burbclave called Metazania, a police franchise called Metacops, and above all The Metaverse, which is Stephenson’s version of consensual hallucination or cyberspace. The Metaverse is metastasis (or metathesis) in its highest form: an alternative to the Meat-verse of physical reality, a rather large world made cunningly to serve the information trade. Functionally the Metaverse is very similar to Gibson’s cyberspatial Matrix–it is a virtual universe in which human agents can manipulate representations of data within a consistent spatial metaphor. But no doubt because he writes from the nineties instead of the eighties, Stephenson does a much better job of imagining the texture of this virtual environment. Gibson’s Matrix is usually a vague or abstract affair, evoked as “lines of light” or some other stylized geometry. The Metaverse, by contrast, features a fully elaborated urban landscape. Its primary attraction is a great Street embracing the 10,000-kilometer equator of a bigger-than-Earth sized virtual planet. This whole business, down to the size of digital living rooms and the gait of digital strollers, is mediated by rules “hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group” (23). Anyone who has regular dealngs with today’s ACM may find this the funniest joke in the book.

But there is finally something troubling about the Metaverse, something which suggests a limit to Stephenson’s metastases, a point at which the novel fails to send itself up. The purpose of irony is generally held to be difference or antithesis, a play of double senses that undercuts the ostensible message. Yet as we have seen, any difference that makes a difference is hard to come by in cybernetic fiction. The same might be said of Stephenson’s metaworld. It is, after all, dominated by a grand boulevard or Street. So the architecture of the Metaverse is strikingly like that of the old Meatverse–both are strip developments organized as a linear array of reduplicating sites laid out in apparently endless paratactic sequence. They are both what one commentator has recently called “Edge Cities,” phalanges of development driven by an impulse to extend along a gradient of relative economic opportunity (see Garreau).

This fundamental linearity is underscored by the primary drama that unfolds in the Metaverse: a prolonged chase scene on virtual motorcyles in which Hiro and his adversary move along linear vectors at thousands of kilometers per hour, but where they remain more or less within the confines of the Street. This chase scene is duplicated on a larger scale in the non-virtual sections of the book, where Hiro makes a long roadtrip from Los Angeles to Alaska through the Pacific Coast megalopolis, the actual Edge City of the early 21st century. The primary difference between the Metaverse and physical reality thus seems to be not logical or ideological but merely economic:

In the real world--planet Earth, Reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer. . . . That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.(24)

So Stephenson’s cyberspace offers no practical alternative to the world of the burbclaves and the shattered mosaic of (dis)enfranchised society. The Metaverse is simply a happy hunting ground for next-generation yuppies: those rich, hip, well-connected legions of Young Virtual Professionals. Stephenson’s meta-move is essentially delusive–and to recognize this is to reach the point at which Snow Crash unfortunately stops being quite so funny. In Stephenson’s imagining, the computer is not an engine of difference after all, but only an alternative medium for the same hegemonic institutions, the same uncritical devotion to linear thinking. Nothing is “free” in the Metaverse. Hiro is able to operate with unusual liberty because he was one of the original designers of the system, but even he has to pay his way by marketing gossip and low-level industrial espionage. Social and economic conditions in the Metaverse mirror those that take place elsewhere in Stephenson’s world, and events in virtual reality follow the same relentless logic as actual events. Which brings us to the most important aspects of Snow Crash: its plot, its medium, and the interaction between the two.

To say that the book presents a contest between good and evil, tyrants and defenders of liberty, is to miss an important subtlety. What this book is really about is a struggle against viral language. The evil genius L. Bob Rife uses two apocalyptic weapons in his campaign to dominate the human race. The first is a cybernetic virus called Snow Crash, which infects digital processors in much the same way that current computer viruses do. However, Snow Crash causes infected machinery to display a version of itself in binary form, multiplexed into random on-off bursts or “video snow.” Adept computer programmers who have internalized the conversion of binary code to units of expression can become infected with Snow Crash if they view the apparently random display–making the crucial (and fortunately fantastic) connection between the machine and the animal. Once infected, the programmers’ brainstems malfunction and they fall into a vegetative coma. Snow Crash also has a non-cybernetic twin, a biological virus spread through prostitution and illegal drug use (of course), whose effects on the brain are less destructive but similarly sinister. People infected with the biological Snow Crash become capable of speaking in tongues and of understanding an Adamic command language which bypasses rational functions. They turn into programmable human robots, cultist zombies in the thrall of L. Bob Rife.

To defeat these (literally) mind-boggling threats, Hiro Protagonist and his allies have to overcome both the biological and the cybernetic versions of the Snow Crash virus. Along with a great deal of mindless violence, this task involves Hiro in historical research (performed hypertextually in the Metaverse) concerning a historical referent for the Biblical story of Babel. It turns out that Snow Crash began as a “metavirus” which caused the infected brain to infect itself with other viruses. This evil agency was apparently transmitted to ancient Sumer from a source in outer space. The antidote to the Sumerian outbreak was “the nam-shub of Enki,” an incantation that literally “changed the speech in men’s mouths” (202), breaking down the neural connections that enabled victims to understand glossolalia, thus rendering them invulnerable to further incantatory programming. After the Babel event, as Stephenson tells it, the linguistic faculty was shifted from the brainstem into the cortex, where it diversified into all the variations of post-Adamic language. Babel was thus not a divine punishment for human overreaching, but a liberation from the first great campaign of cybernetic tyranny.

It was also, crucially, the beginning of bibliocentrism as we know it. According to Stephenson’s myth (which reads like a cross between After Babel and The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross), a group of Hebrew scholars led a reform of literary practices throughout the Semitic world. Stephenson identifies these figures with the Deuteronomists of Biblical history, important figures in the cult of the Torah. Stephenson credits the Deuteronomists with “a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance” (374). Needless to say, this doctrine and the nam-shub of Enki hold the keys to defeating L. Bob Rife. The Sumerian incantation reverses the effects of the biological virus, and the concept of informational hygiene saves the Metaverse from the digital form of Snow Crash. It inspires Hiro to write SnowScan, an anti-viral program that searches for the Snow Crash code, eradicates it, and puts in its place the following message:

IF THIS WERE A VIRUS YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE; HOW'S YOUR SECURITY? CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION(428)

Subsequent consultations, of course, are on a fee-for- service basis. Hiro’s antiviral program replaces a virus with an advertisement, thus redeeming the Metaverse in every sense of the word–and incidentally converting Hiro from a penniless genius into a Meta-Bill Gates. In effect, Hiro becomes the founder of New Deuteronomy, Inc.. His security service will purify the Book of Protocols according to which the Metaverse is constituted by ensuring that it is replicated exactly on every iteration, free of impurities that might harbor invasive or opportunistic memes. As David Porush has suggested, Snow Crash can thus be read as the triumph of book culture over the threats of cybernetic programming and viral language: in other words, a true liber/ratio.

But we began by observing that liberation in the fiction of cyberspace is usually not what it claims to be. To go boldly toward the virtual frontier often leads us where we have all been before: in this case right to the heart of western logocentrism, the holy Book. To a certain classically liberal way of thinking, there is no doubt nothing wrong with such a recursion. If one assumes that the function of art is to trace out great circles, reliably returning to what we have always already known, then a book like Snow Crash deserves praise as proof that literacy can survive the assaults of popular culture and computing, that it can thrive in a world of comic books and cyberspace. But to a more critical reader– perhaps one like Ross who wants to save the concept of the alternative or utopian in science fiction —Snow Crash must be a disappointment.

The letdown is all the more severe because Stephenson makes it clear that the novel we now have before us started out to become something distinctly different. Stephenson says that he and the artist Tony Sheeder first intended to create a graphic novel using computer-generated images. This leads one to wonder why the nature of the project changed as it evolved. What aspect of the conceptual structure of Snow Crash demanded expression in print? That question becomes all the more salient if one considers another curious remark in Stephenson’s epilogue: “I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless from a practical viewpoint” (440). This statement is extremely suggestive, especially in the context of a novel that explores the connection between the animal and the machine, the meat and the meta. What would have happened if Snow Crash had turned out not to be a conventional novel, but had emerged instead as some form of metafiction– perhaps in electronic form?

The conjecture I am about to make possibly represents a misreading of Stephenson’s remark about his computer work on Snow Crash; but even as misreading, the conjecture opens up an interesting set of questions. Why does Stephenson describe his electronic work as “coding”? If all he set out to do was produce digital graphics, then presumably he would have spent his time drawing, scanning, transforming, and editing bitmaps. The products of this work would have been images, not alphanumeric strings or “code.” Unless one sets out to create one’s own computer-graphics tools (an unlikely intention for a Macintosh user like Stephenson), then the work involved in graphics production should not involve many hours of code writing. What else might Stephenson have been up to?

Suppose that the abortive digital format for Snow Crash was not a series of printed panels intended for conventional bound publication, but instead a network of screens linked together by some graphic navigational scheme–in other words, an electronic hypertext. If this were the case, then the change of media, the reversion to the more traditional format of the book, might be very important indeed. It might suggest that Snow Crash is in more than one sense a defense of the book and its ethos: not just the story, but the embodiment of a New Deuteronomy. It might thus provide a limit case for the fiction of cyberspace, a point at which it is possble either to stay within print culture or to explore alternatives.

Whether or not he ever had other notions, Stephenson has taken the more conservative option, which is indeed the preference of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. Nor can he really be blamed for this choice. Snow Crash as written would not make a very good hypertextual fiction. Not only is the book’s world overwhelmingly two-dimensional and linear, its plot demands an exact and unvarying sequence of events. There are several complications and partial reversals, but all of these serve the general underlying logic, which specifies that Hiro must vanquish Rife and his henchmen and Save The World. This headlong rush toward singular closure is what a comic book is all about, after all–even when, as in the Death of Superman, that singular outcome annuls the usual order of things. Had Stephenson been programming Snow Crash as what Michael Joyce calls a “multiple fiction,” he would have had to allow for more than one outcome. He would have had to present permutations of the story where everyone’s linear ambitions–hero’s, villain’s, anti-hero’s –come to confusion. In short, Stephenson would have had to imagine outcomes where the defenders of the Book do not triumph, where informational hygiene does not win out, and the Metaverse goes unredeemed.

So why didn’t Stephenson do this? Perhaps it never entered his head: I have no real evidence that Stephenson ever considered producing a hypertext. Nonetheless, it seems clear that this book could not have been written in that medium. Literary structures like multiple fiction are not altogether consistent with informational hygiene, the conception of data (or language) as a controlled substance. If the power of the book resides in its cult of exact replication, then to admit the possibility of narrative variations is at least implicitly to threaten that old word order.

Of course, writing in an electronic mode does not necessarily promote utopian or post-hierarchical forms of disourse. Consider William Gibson’s recent foray into digital composition, his conceptual artwork Agrippa. Far from opening up to permutation, this text actually erases itself after a single reading, locking the reader out of its imaginary space (see Quittner). As Joyce points out, even multiple fictions as we now know them usually consist of “exploratory” texts in which the range of variation is strictly limited, hence at some level deceptive. So perhaps the hypertextual enterprise must also go where everyone has gone before, namely to a Disneyverse of delusive referendum where every apparent difference traces back to some determinist engine. Yet as Henry Jenkins has shown, there are signs even in non-interactive contexts that a more “participatory” cultural front may be emerging. Ambiguous or polysemic forms like the graphic novel (as in Moore and Sienkiewicz’s abortive Big Numbers) imply a fraying or complication of traditional, monolinear narrative. Forms like hypertext suggest that the language virus may be capable of even more radical outbreaks. For if our narrative forms embrace inconsistencies and contradictions, then they are no longer adequate defenses against memetic invasion. If the protocols of the imaginary world advertise their own contingency, then what is to stop someone not authorized by the Association for Cosmological Machinery from further interventions–which are in fact facilitated by the ease of copying and modification inherent in electronic media?

The best way to pre-empt such uprisings is to keep throwing the Book at us, which is what Neal Stephenson and most other writers in the cyberpunk line continue to do. Both in its medium and its message, Snow Crash militates against any departure from traditional discursive authority. Like virtually all mainstream cyberspace writers (and in contrast to figures like William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker), Stephenson delivers our favorite kind of linear entertainment: a “slam-bang-overdrive” sort of fiction, as Timothy Leary duly blathers on the back cover. As a form of entertainment, this sort of novel is always essentially self-serving; but what it serves up in this case is an unfortunately limited view of the possibilities for virtual culture.

So long as we continue to imagine cyberspace and other forms of artificial reality from within headlong vehicles such as Snow Crash, we will always find ourselves somewhere on the Street. The Street, we might remember, only looks like a straight line. In fact it is a circle that runs all the way around the planet and comes back to the place it began, back to the same old future so neatly packaged for us in dystopian novels and films. The Street, Gibson reminds us, finds its uses for everything. But perhaps we should now ask, of what use is the Street?

References
- Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
- Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
- Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1985.
- Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1990.
- Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Joyce, Michael. “Selfish Interaction or Subversive Texts and the Multiple Novel.” The Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook. Ed. E. Berk and J. Devlin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. 79-94.
- LeGuin, Ursula K. Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1980.
- Porush, David. “Why Cyberspace Can’t Be Utopian: The Positive Discourses of Irrationalism in an As If Universe.” Presentation. Society for Literature and Science Conference, Atlanta, GA: October 9, 1992.
- Quittner, Josh. “Read Any Good Webs Lately?” Newsday. June 16, 1992.
- Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. New York: Verso, 1991.
- Rucker, Rudy. Wetware. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
- Sterling, Bruce. Islands in the Net. New York: Morrow, 1988.
- Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: The Science of Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
September 25, 2013

Introducing Mail Art: A Karen Elliot Interview with Crackerjack Kid and Honoria

Honoria
honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu

Hubener: Karen Elliot is the founder of Plagiarism and the
1990-1993 Art Strike. Crackerjack Kid has been active in
mail art since 1978 and is the editor of Eternal Network,
an illustrated mail art anthology scheduled for publication
in 1993 by University of Calgary Press. Honoria, a.k.a.
Mail Art Kisses for Peace, Touriste, and Fake Picabia
Sister, hails from Austin, Texas where she is the MailArt
editor of ND Magazine. All three artists are active
networkers who use both the international postal system and
electronic mail links to distribute information, concepts,
and sometimes a surprise wrapped in an enigma.

Karen Elliot (hereafter KE): Well, Crackerjack Kid, they say you
compare mail art to Crackerjack candy--that you like putting
a surprise in everybody's mailbox. Who have you surprised
lately, and who in turn surprises you most often?

Crackerjack Kid (hereafter CJK): I could say that nothing in mail
art surprises me anymore, but it does. D. Peepol of Akron,
Ohio once mailed a lunch bag of black, sooty, perfumed dust
and while I was opening it, the contents spilled over my lap
onto the furniture and floor. A small tag remained in the
sack with the startling announcement: "These are the last
mortal remains of my dear aunty Sarah." Shmuel in
Brattleboro, Vermont is only an hour down the road from me
and yet s/he regularly sends add-on objects like driftwood,
pistachios, walnuts, cryptic coded postcards, and most
recently, a 3-D paper monoplane which arrived in an official
plastic USPS "body bag." Among the most unusal items I've
mailed are navel stamps and a sourdough bread baguette I
carved into a phallus. I stuffed it into an oversized
Crackerjack box for the John Bennett and Cathy Mehrl mail
art marriage show.

(H) One of the weirdest pieces of mail I received was a pop-up
hand made splatter-painted paper sea skate from Kevin in
Atlanta. Somehow our correspondance evolved into sending
each other fish. It became pretty challenging after the
first dozen or so fish images. He even sent me some cut out
ads for efficiency apartments. I sent him a photo of dried
out, ugly as sin, cat-fish heads hanging on a Texas barbed
wire fence. I found a souvenir of Florid, a wooden paddle
in the shape of a fish, the toy kind with a rubber band and
ball attached. I haven't sent it to him yet because our
corresponding fishing hole gradually dried up. I still
send him a bait fish every now and then and when he's in the
mood (maybe now, after artstrike) he'll get a reel and
flop some more fish on the postal scales. Another long term
correspondent in Indiana sends naive brightly colored
drawings on envelopes with each letter. One of them was
called mother bar-b-ques the cat. These don't have the
verbal shock value of Cracker's examples but if you saw
them you'd agree on their dramatic weirdness levels. But
let me tell you about the most relaxing piece of mail I ever
received. It was from a correspondent in Oregon, a
liscenced massage therapist. He suggested flirtatiously
that he and I engage in a mail fantasy. I told him I was a
prude but would have a fantasy as long as it wasn't a sex
fantasy. I told him I could use a licensed massage
fantasy. He wrote back asking what scent of oil I wanted
and what music. I answered rose with a hint of citrus and
that Mozart clarinet thing and he sent me a full body
massage description in anatomical detail ending with a
secret for turning on the parasympathetic nervous system and
a $5 off coupon.

(CJK) Both Honoria and I could go on forever about wacky mail
because the sacred and profane are so commonplace in the
mail art mailstream. There aren't any rules guiding what
can and can't be sent. Short of mail fraud, mailing bombs,
drugs, or dirt from Canada, most everything gets posted.
There was a mail art show in California with a conceptual
theme titled, "Test the Post Office." Objects mailed
included an addressed water filled balloon. Someone sent a
fifteen feet long garden hose with over a hundred one cent
stamps on the hose surface. A sly mail artist tested the
honesty of the postal system by laminating and addressing a
ten dollar bill; it arrived safely for the show in Los
Angeles.

(KE) You're planning on opening mail art here in this studio loft
in SoHo. So am I right to assume you're having a "mail art
opening?"

(H) Oh, most definitely! The public will open the mail that's
accumulated at this address over the past three months. We
decided to let the public take the unopened mail art off the
walls and replace it with their own offerings. There are
tables all over the studio with materials for making mail
art. Our show, is just one of several dozen other mail art
shows and projects which simulateously carry on every month.
You can get the newest mail art show listings by writing to
Ashley Parker Owens (73358 N. Damen, Chicago, IL 60645).
Her "Global Mail" is a newsletter of international mail art
events that's published three times yearly in January, May,
and September. There are numerous other trade zines,
bulletins, and mainstream magazines which regularly post
mail art show listings, but I'm most impressed by the sheer
volume of projects and shows in her publication. By the
way, PMC readers can reach CrackerJack Kid via email (see
list at end of interview). He also edits a mail art zine
entitled Netshaker. Annual subscription is $12.00 payable
by check or money order at PO Box 978, Hanover, NH 03755.

(KE) But where are the people you invited? Aren't mail art shows
supposed to be public events--places where mail artists can
have a "coming out" and expose their secret, intimate,
hidden mailstream corresponDANCES!

(CJK) Well Karen, I like how you accented Dances because that's
just what mail artists do, they DANCE to an off-beat,
underground chant called "Gift Exchange." Someone once said
mail art was Christmas in the mailbox everyday of the year,
but we're here to let the public cut in on the dance. Our
show in part recalls the first mail art exhibition, The New
York Correspondance School Show" curated in 1970 by Marcia
Tucker at the Whitney Museum. That show incorporated the
work of 106 people, all individuals who had mailed art to
Ray Johnson. The irony was that Johnson's work wasn't
present because he asked his correspondents to submit their
work to him instead. We've invited everybody in New York
City to this show who has the last name Elliot, or
Johnson--in honor of you and especially Ray Johnson who is
the father of mail art. Of course anybody else is welcome
to send mail art too.

(KE) Holy Akademagorrod! Didn't Ray Johnson do that once--I
mean, call everybody named Ray Johnson in the NYC phonebook
to a New York Correspondance School Party?

(H) Not exactly Karen, but Ray Johnson did have a "Michael
Cooper, Michael Cooper, Michael Cooper Club." There were
two Michael Coopers who knew each other, and there was a
third Michael Cooper that Johnson knew. Johnson arranged to
have all the Coopers meet each other. Johnson has arranged
a lot of meetings. His mail art goes back to the
mid-forties and quite a few people in the art and non-art
world have had at least a mailing or two, fragmentary
riddles that add to his mythic legend.

(KE) What does he mail?

(CJK) Cartoon characters like his bunny head, correspondence,
mailings from previous works, and multilayered collages.
Ray Johnson is a pun shaper who finds words within words and
he's a master of wit who often mixes images with texts. But
the best way to experience Ray Johnson is to interact with
him by dropping something in his mailbox. His address is 44
West 7 Street, Locust Valley, New York 11560.

(H) Also, a lot of pictures of Ray Johnson are sent throughout
the network with invitations to intervene upon them. I
received Ray Johnson's high school picture once from Italy.
I cut it in half and put it in two TV sets and sent it back.
How many Ray Johnson bath tubs are there? That's a very
popular project. You usually add yourself to the zeroxed
pile of networkers taking a bath with Ray Johnson. One
imagines the rubberstamp pad ink dissolving off the artists
making a colorful bathtub ring.

(CJK) Ray Johnson is also notorious for his institutional
inventions. In the 1973 "Death Announcements" section of
The New York Times, Johnson announced the demise of his New
York Correspondence School, which was shortly thereafter
reborn as Buddha University. Numerous Johnson inspired Fan
Clubs grew under the rubric of the NYCS. I mentioned the
Michael Cooper Club, but there was also the Shelley Duvall
Fan Club, Marcel Duchamp Fan Club, the Blue Eyes Club and
it's Japanese equivalent, "the Brue Eyes Crub." Johnson's
network of mail art contacts has expanded in recent years to
include phone calls which range from informative to
mysterious. Ray called me one evening two months ago to say
that the first New York Correspondence School meeting took
place in a Manhattan Quaker Meeting House. I was telling
Ray how spirited mail artists interested me, mail art that
shakes, rattles, quakes, and rolls--artists who I'm fond of
calling "netshakers." Johnson said his meeting at the
Quaker House was just a meeting of friends, but he hoped
that the people whould go into religious convulsions and do
Quaker shaking.

(KE) I understand Johnson's importance to mail art, but is there
an association between Ray Johnson and the selection of this
space for your mail art show?

(CJK) Yes, in an oblique way I chose the NYC location over the
Emily Harvey Gallery and Jean Depuy loft because this is
where Fluxus master George Maciunas lived for awhile.
Maciunas and Ray Johnson knew one another. From 1960-61
Maciunas ran AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue, a performance
space not far from where we are now. It's been said that
SoHo started due to Maciunas's establishment of the first
SoHo cooperative building at 80 Wooster Street. Johnson
performed a "Nothing" at Maciunas's AG Gallery just before
it closed in July 1961. Maciunas is credited as one of the
founding members of Fluxus.

(KE) What's Fluxus?

(CJK) Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas and a small
group of artists started a new "tendency" or intermedia
perception--George Maciunas named it Fluxus. Fluxus implies
"the state of being in flux, of movement, ephemerality,
playfulness, and experimentalism. This fluxattitude
resulted in numerous publications, feasts, and Fluxfests.
One of those performances occured here when Maciunas married
Billie Hutching on February 25, 1978. Wedding guests and
the "wedding train," performed Flux Cabaret.

(KE) So Maciunas and Johnson were both Fluxus artists?

(CJK) Yes, although if Maciunas were alive today, I doubt he or
Johnson would agree on any close interconnection through
their work. Neither Mail Art or Fluxus are movements as
much as they are tendencies. Maciunas, unlike Johnson or
most of the Fluxus artists, had an anarchistic, utopian
vision whereas Johnson's mail was actually correspondence
art, an intimate, personal exchange between an individual or
small group of people. It was the American Fluxus artist
Ken Friedman who took mail art out of the personal realm and
into the international paradigm in which Fluxus artists were
engaged. Friedman's 1973 Omaha Flow Systems established
the mail art ethic for shows like this one we're having.
Friedman brought his Fluxus background to mail art in the
pursuit of open, democratic, interactive exhibitions which
encouraged viewers to participate. Interaction with
audiences has always been a Fluxus characteristic.

(KE) Let's return to mail art shows for a minute. What shows
have you entered, Honoria?

(H) My favorite mailart activity is entering mail art shows by
submitting small pieces of art at the request of another
networker in response to their chosen theme. I ended up
painting hundreds of postcard sized figures and skeletons in
response to the shadow project(s) commemorating the people
vaporized by the WWII atomic explosion on Hiroshima. I put
some of them on a black poncho and wore them to a Day of the
Dead celebration in Austin and danced to cojunto music. You
never know where mailart will go or send you. I used to
work in an isolated and local competitive market (fine) art
environment. Now I feel the flow of art & ideas in and out
of my studio room is part of a huge global art studio where
we get together to gossip, philosophize, show each other new
unfinished work, and communicate fresh ideas. The mailartist
to mailartist communication uses all kinds of shortcuts that
artist-to-general public, or even informed art historically
astute public will not get. Our jargon, in-jokes and
creative playfulness are as slippery as freshly licked glue
on the back of a 50 cent stamp about to be placed on a
recycled envelope bound for Japan. For instance, everyone I
know outside the network thinks plagiarism is a naughty
deceit. Within the network Plagiarism is an art movement.
In fact, there have been festivals of plagiarism. Recycling
other artists images is a basic concept in mail art.

(CJK) Appropriation, sorting, and shuffling written texts is also
a very corresponDANCE kind of improvisational jazz you'll
find in the mail art network. Indeed, name sharing and
detourning strategies began surfacing in mail art back in
the early 1970s. Dadaism, Nouveau Realisme, Futurism,
COBRA, Fluxus, and Situationalism have all played varied
influential roles in the mail art mailstream.

(H) Now Karen, just between us girls, I want to know if you've
been catching this drift? I've noticed a renewed interest
in the actions and representations of women in the network.
Jennifer Huebert (POB 395, Rifton, NY 12471) just collected
mail from women networkers who attended congresses in 1992.
I'm looking forward to reading other people's views. In a
huge network full of pseudonyms and correspondents who don't
speak each others languages I think it's odd, but fun, to
examine the yin/yang aspect of it all. One networker is
named manwoman.

(CJK) Yeh, I know ManWoman! S/he's a Canadian Pop Artist, a
musician, poet, and a shaman who has an on-going project to
restore the sacred, mystical significance of the ancient
swastika--before it was denigrated by National Socialism.
S/he believes in dreams and can analyze their symbolic
significance. When I told ManWoman that Cathyjack and I
were trying to have a child, S/he sent me a fertility chant
which, low and behold, WORKED within a week after I received
it in the mail. That makes ManWoman more than just a
charming individual--S/he's a very kind, gentle soul, a
sage. There's a certain charismatic aura and mystery in
meeting such people through the mail--pseudonyms like
ManWoman and Michael VooDoo help to create an unpredictable,
unusual postal pantheon.

(H) I have deduced from my correspondence that some mail artists
perceive Honoriartist as a male. Maybe it's due to my
fertile imagination (although to my knowlegdge my mail has
never been responsible for a pregnancy) plus my connections
and art collaborations with transvestites. Then there's all
this collaborating going on between many artists. However,
in the process of the historification of mailart someone
will get interested in who is actually who and what sex they
are. I am quite content 2 be both or more.

(KE) I can certainly understand reasons for creating fictive
monikers, but judging by both of your comments it seems that
fact is often stranger than fiction in mail art netland.
Now, on to a final question or two. Readers of PMC have
seen sporadic Networker Congress and Telenetlink Congress
listings in their electronic forum throughout 1992. You
(C.J. Kid) and Reed Altemus have called attention to
yourselves as facilitators of these congress events. What's
this congress biz all about?

(CJK) 1992 was the year of the World-Wide Decentralized Networker
Congress, otherwise known as METANET, or NC92. The
Networker Congresses were first proposed by Swiss conceptual
artist H.R. Fricker in "Mail Art: A Process of Detachment,"
a text presented in March 1990 for my book Eternal Network:
A Mail Art Anthology (to be published in Dec. 1993 by
University of Calgary Press). In early 1991 Fricker met
with fellow Swiss artist Peter W. Kaufmann and together they
drafted an invitational flyer entitled, Decentralized
World-Wide Networker Congress 1992. The congress call went
out to anybody, "Wherever two or more artists/networkers
meet in the course of 1992, there a congress will take
place." The Networker Congresses, like the Mail Art
Congresses of 1986, grew into a huge forum of 180 congresses
in over twenty countries.

(KE) Sounds like an enormous project. How was it organized?

(CJK) H.R. Fricker and Peter W. Kaufmann sought active, creative
input from networker artists on six continents. American
artists Lloyd Dunn, Steve Perkins, John Held Jr., Mark
Corroto, and I joined Fricker and Kaufmann early (summer
1991) in the development of the NC92 concept and served as
active "netlink facilitators." Final drafts of the
Networker Congress invitations included netlink contacts
from Africa, South America, North America, Asia, Europe and
Australia.

(KE) Is it fair to assume that the networker artist has grown out
of the mail art phenomenon?

(CJK) I think so. The Networker Congresses were based on the
acknowledgment that a new form of artist, the networker, was
emerging from international network cultures of the
alternative press, mail art community, telematic artists,
flyposter artists, cyberpunks, cassette bands,
rubberstampers and stamp artists. The year-long collective
work by networkers of NC92 represents the first major effort
among artists to cross-over and introduce diverse
underground networks to each other. Until this moment
countless marginal networks, often operating in parallel
directions, were unaware of one another. Mail artists that
network have a sense of what intermedia and interactivity
involve--it's a consciousness which branches outward. One
could say that mail art's evolution was based upon
intermedia--the mailstream merging of zines, artist stamps,
rubberstamping, correspondence, sound sculpting with audio
cassettes, visual poetry, and artists' books. Communication
concepts have been the medium and message that mail artists
use to bind together these divergent forms of expression.
Today, forms like stamp art have become genres unto their
own, with proscribed criteria often veering towards
normative art standards more than the spirit of a process.
I read somewhere in Lund Art Press that the most successful
intermedia forms eventually cease to be intermedia. These
creative forms evolve into the qualitative characteristics
of techniques and styles and will finally become established
media with names, histories and contexts of their own.
Indeed, the rarity of mail may come to pass with the
continued escalation of postal rates. This may encourage
more qualitative standards within the mail art network.

(KE) Well Cracker--Can I call you Cracker? (Crackerjack nods his
head)--what's wrong with qualitative standards?

(CJK) Hey Karen, didn't you know that when you're really good
they call you crackerjack? Really though, for me, the
thrill of the process is being inventive, taking yourself
somewhere you haven't been before. It can certainly go
stale if you don't know when to let go, when to hold back
from too much mail. Burnout in mail art is rampant. I'm
not a statistician, but to get a focus on what my mail art
activities involve each year, I set about tallying all my
in-out going mail for 1992. It revealed some startling
figures to me. Not including hundreds of email message,
I've sent out over 1,150 mail art works and have received
1,250 pieces in return. These figures state that I usually
answer most of the mail that I receive. It also shows that
with all of my international mailings, I spend, on the
average, about $1.20 postage on each item of mail art I
send. That makes for an expensive passion! I might want to
cut back. I might want to reconsider the investment of my
time and energy, or I might decide to conserve the time,
energy, and money for those I feel return the same
intensity, joy, and playfulness of dialogue. The bottom
line is that there are personal criteria for entering and
leaving mail art. You definitely receive what you are
willing to give and you quickly find out what your threshold
for tolerance is.

(KE) Let's return to the networker congress concept. What kinds
of congresses were there in 1992?

(H) I was invited to a place I'd never heard of called Villorba,
Italy by a long time correspondent, Ruggero Maggi, who sent
me some wonderful kisses when I did my kiss show. I went to
congress with the Italians and wow, am I glad I did. Long
philosophical talks on the lawn of the beautiful Villa
Fanna, videos of many networkers, performances, poetry,
hours of exchanging, making, sending artworks, food, wine,
joy, laughter, howling at the moon, walking barefoot in
mudpuddles.... Well, you can just imagine it took the wind
right out of my mid-life crisis. This congress was
dedicated to the great mail artist A. G. Cavellini and they
just made his archive into a museum. We just don't have
time to get into Cavellini and the philosophy of "don't make
Art make PR" and self-historification etc..

(CJK) Among the scores of other congress themes were John Held
Jr.'s Fax Congress, Jennifer Huber's Woman's Congress,
Miekel And & Liz Was's Dreamtime Village Corroboree, my own
Netshaker Harmonic Divergence, Rea Nikonova and Serge
Segay's Vacuum Congress, Bill Gaglione's Rubberstamp
Congress, Mike Dyar's Joseph Beuys Seance, Guy Bleus's
Antwerp Zoo Congress, and O.Jason & Calum Selkirk's Seizing
the Media Congress. There were also numerous, on-going
networker projects including Peter Kustermann and Angela
Pahler's global tour as "netmailmen performers." Throughout
1992 Kustermann and Pahler travelled, congressed, lectured,
recorded a diary, and hand-delivered mail person-to-person.
Italian mail artist Vittore Baroni helped create and record
a networker congress anthem, Let's Network Together, and
American mail artist Mark Corroto produced Face of the Congress networker congress zine.

(KE) So how do you think all these NC92 congresses worked? Did
they succeed or fail?

(CJK) I think they were remarkable! Most of the organizers of
NC92 congresses have been active international mail artists.
They have emerged from the networker year of activities with
a deeper awareness of intermedia involvement in global
network communities, and a realization that "I am a mail
artist, sometimes." While many mail artists visited friends
in the flesh, others, unable to travel, "meta-networker
spirit to spirit" in the NC92 Telenetlink Congress, a
homebased telecommunication project conducted with
networkers using personal computers and modems. Serbian and
Croat mail artists established networker peace congresses,
one such congress taking place in a village where a battle
raged around them.

(KE) Our on-line readers would probably like to know what your
Telenetlink Congress was about. Can you briefly state your
objective?

(CJK) My objectives were to introduce and eventually netlink the
international telematic community with the mail art
mailstream. I began forming an email list of
telecommunication artists which I compiled from responses to
my numerous NC92 Telenetlink postings on internet, BBS',
electronic journals, and Usenet Newsgroups. I began
Telenetlink in June 1991 by participating in Artur Matuck's
global telecommunication project Reflux Network Project.
There I served as an active netlink between the telematic
community on one hand, and the mail art network's
Decentralized World-Wide Networker Congress, 1992. Where
these two projects intersected there were informal on-line
congresses in which the role of the networker was discussed.
Conceptual on-line projects such as the Spirit Netlink
Performance drew in crowds of participants at the Reflux
Network Project link in the Sao Paulo Bienale.

(KE) Haven't mail artists and telematic artists interacted
through collaborative projects using mail and e-mail?

(CJK) It comes as no surprise that pioneering telematic artists
like Fred Truck, Judy Malloy, and Carl Loeffler were once
quite active in mail art's early years, but efforts to
combine both mail art and telematic forms were never fully
approached. My Telenetlink project was the first home-based
effort to interconnect the telematic and mail art worlds.
By netlinking both parallel network worlds, I found many
common tendencies; internationalism, interest in intermedia
concepts, respect for cultural diversity, humor,
ephemerality, emphasis upon process art rather artifact,
humor, global spirituality unencumbered by religious dogma,
utopian idealism, experimentalism, and interest in
resolution of the art/life dichotomy. Prior to Telenetlink
there were mail artists such as Mark Block (U.S.), Ruud
Janssen (The Netherlands), and Charles Francois (Belgium),
whose efforts were aimed at introducing mail art through
their own private Bulletin Board Services, but netlinking
mail art and the telematic community through mainframes on
internet hadn't been explored. Fewer than four dozen mail
artists are actively using computers to explore
communicative art concepts, but that number is rapidly
changing now that computer technology is more affordable.
Still, some mail artists view their form as more intimate,
tactile, expressive, and communicative than
telecommunication art. Other mail artists regard computers
with mistrust, suspicion, even fear. Likewise, I have heard
telecommunication artists view mail art as a primitive,
slow, outmoded, form of expression. I prefer to think of
telematic art and mail art as useful tools for creative
communication. It's not a matter of one form being superior
to another. I think the time is right for mail artists and
telematic artists to get acquainted--to netshake--to
telenetlink worlds. Here's a list of telecommunication
artists who use mail art and email as intermedia forms. I
think this is the best way Honoria, Karen Elliot, and I can
help PMC readers learn about mail art--to experience the
direct contact.

(KE) Well, I think that's a good way to come full circle in this
discussion. To know mail art and telematic art is to
experience it. Thanks Honoria and Crackerjack for opening
up some possibilities to interconnect network communities.

Telenetlink contacts

Reed Altemus:

IP25196%PORTLAND.bitnet

George Brett:

ecsvax!ghb@uncecs.edu

Burning Press:

au462@cleveland.Freenet.edu

Anna Couey:

couey@well.sf.ca.us

Crackerjack Kid:

Cathryn.L.Welch@dartmouth.edu

Keith DeMendonca:

keithdm@syma.sussex.ac.uk

FaGaGaGa:

ae705@yfn.ysu.edu

Pete Fisher:

Pete.Fischer@stjhmc.fidonet.org

Joachim Frank:

joachim@tethys.ph.albany.edu

Bob Gale:

bgale@well.sf.ca.us

Matt Hogan:

m91hogan.acs.syr.edu

Honoria:

honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu

Hubener:

72630.2465@compuserve.com

Judy Malloy:

jmalloy@garnet.berkeley.edu

Artur Matuck:

am4g+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU

Paul Rutkovsky:

prutkov@mailer.cc.fsu.edu

Scot Art:

Scot.Art@f909.n712.z3.fidonet.org

Uncle Don:

DPMILLIKEN@amherst.edu

September 25, 2013

Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design
Kathleen Burnett

Communication, Information & Library Studies
Rutgers University
burnet@zodiac.rutgers.edu

While the study of the temporal and spatial distanciation of communication is important to the concept of the mode of information the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. For the issue of communicational efficiency . . . does not raise the basic question of the configuration of information exchange, or what I call the wrapping of language.

–Poster, 8

Hypertext/Hypermedia

What distinguishes hypermedia from other modes of information is not that it is computer-driven–after all, the browsing and retrieval mechanisms of Vannevar Bush’s memex were non-electronic–nor that it is interactive, since the entire history of oral communication, whether electronically mediated or not, might be characterized as interactive; nor even that it includes navigational apparatus such as links and nodes, which might better be thought of as symptoms than causes, or buttresses rather than groundwork. What distinguishes hypermedia is that it posits an information structure so dissimilar to any other in human experience that it is difficult to describe as a structure at all. It is nonlinear, and therefore may seem an alien wrapping of language when compared to the historical path written communication has traversed; it is explicitly non-sequential, neither hierarchical nor “rooted” in its organizational structure, and therefore may appear chaotic and entropic. Yet clearly, human thought processes include nonlinear, nonsequential, and interactive characteristics which, when acknowledged by traditional information structures, are not supported. In fact, one might characterize the history of information transfer as a tyranny against such characteristics, that is, a tyranny against the rhizome.

Hypermedia might be understood as one manifestation of the struggle against this tyranny. In current parlance, hypermedia is used to describe both applications which make use of navigational tools such as links and nodes to form “texts” or databases, and the organizational principles of such “texts” and databases. Hypertext is also used to denote these same meanings. When a distinction is drawn between the two, it normally focuses on content–“hypertext” is used to refer to hyper-structures consisting exclusively of written texts, while “hypermedia” denotes similar structures built around multiple media. Others have noted the artificiality of such a delineation. “Text” is also used as a synonym for a “written work” or “book” which may or may not be limited to alphanumeric characters. A “text” may included charts, graphs, illustrations, photographs, and other visual media in its expression of meaning. Why then should a “hypertext”–which has the potential for incorporating an even wider range of expressive media (sound, animation, etc.)–be limited to alphanumeric characters in its expression?

A more useful differentiation might be drawn along structural rather than contextual lines. Hypertext demonstrates “traits that are usually obscured by the enforced linearity of paper printing”; it is text–only more so–because it participates in a structure that resonates asynchronous and nonlinear relationships. Hypertext is a kind of weaving–“text” derives ultimately from the Latin texere, and thus shares a common root with “textile”–a structuring with texture–web, warp, and weave, allowing for infinite variation in color, pattern and material; it is the loom that structures the “text-ile.” Hypertext is the organizational principle of hypermedia. Hypermedia is the medium of expression of a given hypertext structure. When that medium mirrors the singularity of the print medium of alphanumeric text, it may be properly called either “hypertext” or “hypermedia”; when the medium reflects an “intertwingling” (Nelson 31) of what we understand as separate “media” in the analog sense of the term, it should perhaps be referred to as “hypermedia,” but might equally be acknowledged as “hypertext.” Neither hypertext nor hypermedia is an object, rather the former is a structure, and the latter a medium, of information transfer.

Historical Context

All electronically mediated exchange participates in hypertext, though the degree of participation varies enormously. Some electronically mediated exchange is “hypertextual” only to the degree that it is virtual–that it consists of a series of switches or codes (binary or otherwise) which are, in and of themselves, unreadable (and, therefore, nontextual), and which contain “pointers” to their reconstruction as meaningful exchanges. The switches or codes are “nodes” which are “linked” to a “textual” form which, at any given moment may exist only “hypertextually.” Electronically mediated exchange is therefore paradigmatically different from other modes of information precisely because it participates in the organizing principle of hypertext.

In The Mode of Information, Poster proposes a concept which plays on Marx’s theory of the mode of production:

By mode of information I similarly suggest that history may be periodized by variations in the structure in this case of symbolic exchange, but also that the current culture gives a certain fetishistic importance to 'information.' Every age employs forms of symbolic exchange which contain internal and external structures, means and relations of signification. Stages in the mode of information may be tentatively designated as follows: face-to-face, orally mediated exchange; written exchanges mediated by print; and electronically mediated exchange.(Poster 6)

Poster’s periodization suffers from the coarseness of any totalizing metaphor. While he stresses the trans-historical nature of his classification of symbolic exchange, the metaphor is only as effective as it is historically informed. As outlined, the third stage–written exchanges mediated by print–is not only Western in its bias, but fails even within this bias to recognize a rather large chunk of history–the manuscript period (circa 4th century AD through the mid-fifteenth). An examination of the influence of the mode of information on social structure can only be enriched by the recognition of the impact of mass-production, in the form of the mechanized reproduction of written language, on that structure. It is impossible, however, to understand the full significance of this impact, either historically or theoretically, unless its contextualization is carefully discerned. For example, contrast these two very different experiences of the introduction of the hand-press and its effects on social stratification.

The pre-Reformation Church was able to maintain a restrictive social stratification largely because of its ability to control the production and comprehension of written communication–those who could read and write belonged to a privileged elite, while those who could not had to be satisfied with acquiring their information from those who did. Through most of the Medieval period and well into the Renaissance, the Church was able to control the size and membership of the elite through two mechanisms: Latin education and limited distribution of written communication. The latter was facilitated by production limits imposed by the rigorous and time-consuming process of hand-copying, which in turn limited the supply of reading material. Without supply, the demand for education was kept to levels that the Church could manipulate and control. The introduction of the hand-press in the mid-fifteenth century was accompanied by a precipitous erosion of that control which led decisively to the Reformation. Once reading material could be produced in large quantities in a relatively short period of time–500 to 1000 copies of an average-length manuscript could be produced by a printer owning two hand-presses within the space of less than a month, as compared to the production of a single copy of a manuscript, which could take up to a year–in other words, once the non-elite were able to acquire material to read, they began to do so. Printers, recognizing the commercial potential of this new market, began to produce material in the vulgate, which in turn expedited exponential growth in the educated population, since it facilitated the process of self-education. As this population grew, demands for equity in education across social classes escalated. The earliest signs of this movement are evident in the growth of the popular and self-help literature markets, and the introduction of mass communication, across time and distance, over which the Church could ultimately exercise little effective control (Eisenstein).

Contrast this experience with that of the introduction of a hand-press in colonial Massachusetts in 1660 for the express purpose of propagating the gospel among the Indians, who had no written language. The social stratification which existed within the tribe prior to the introduction of the press was anchored in the individual’s ability to communicate with the spiritual realm and was maintained through oral mediation of the ritual culture. After the introduction of the press, the very foundations of that stratification were undermined. A schism developed between those who subscribed to the gospel, and thus to the notion of a single god, and those who continued in the old beliefs. Since the introduction of the very act of written communication was inextricably tied to the new religion, many who did not endorse the Christian faith simply refused to acknowledge the new mode of information.

Clearly the introduction of the hand-press in this context did not have the effect of popularizing written communication that it had in western Europe on the eve of the Reformation. While differences in the social structures of the two cultures might be cited as the major contributing factors in this differentiation, the privileged status of chirography in pre-Reformation Europe clearly at least served to buttress the social structure of that culture, while the absence of any form of written culture in the case of the Native American tribe equally served to buttress a quite distinct social structure. Both structures were undermined by the introduction of a new mode of information, but in very different ways. While a totalizing metaphor may be put to effective use in an account of this differentiation, Poster’s four-stage delineation is simply too coarse to serve. Clearly, a distinction must be drawn between a culture which partakes only of oral exchanges and one in which oral exchange is coupled with some form of written exchange. Equally clearly, a similar distinction needs to be drawn between written exchanges mediated by chirographic writing and written exchanges mediated by typographic writing. The latter of these could be further subdivided into two stages: the first mediated by hand-press reproduction, and the second by machine-press reproduction. The importance of this latter distinction is borne out by the study of the growth of literacy in nineteenth-century Europe following the introduction of the mechanized press (cf. Altick and Eisenstein).

Between Poster’s third stage–written exchanges mediated by print–and his fourth–electronically mediated exchange–lies much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for although he does at one point acknowledge the nineteenth century origins of electronically mediated information systems in the telegraph and photography (19), his analysis of such systems is limited to the telephone, television advertising, databases, computer writing and computer science. The inclusion of the machine-press production stage suggested above accounts for a large share of the information technology of the nineteenth century, but the end of that century and the first half of the next, it seems to me, several quite distinct modes of information transfer have emerged which may help to provide a bridge from written exchanges to electronically mediated exchange and, particularly, to multimedia exchange mediated electronically.

We might group the various non-computer modes of information available in the twentieth century in a variety of ways; I would like to propose one such classificatory scheme based, as is Poster’s, on the wrapping of exchange:

verbal media:

telegraph, radio, telephone

visual media:

visual arts media (painting, sculpture, etc), photography

combinatory media:

offset printing, film, television, video

The first group fits neatly into Poster’s progression, since it participates in the wrappings of language. Historically, it is characterized by progressively orally mediated electronic exchange, which might be seen as an inversion of the pattern found in the Poster’s earlier stages. The fit of the second and third groups into Poster’s schema is more problematic because, despite his statement that the study of the mode of information “must include a study of the forms of information storage and retrieval, from cave painting and clay tablets to computer databases and communications satellites” (7), his pre-electronic mediation stages are all decisively characterized by their participation in the wrappings of language. Nonetheless, visual means of communication and information transfer have always existed–from cave paintings to religious icons to Gothic cathedrals to paintings, sculpture, and other visual arts media. The information-poor, one might even argue, have historically relied on the visual media as their primary mode of reproducible information transfer. Certainly this was true in Western Europe before the growth of literacy, and even today scholars point to the democratizing effect of television.

Also evident in the development of twentieth-century modes of information is a ever-increasing trend toward synchronous combinatory media. This January, AT&T announced the release of its first videophone, the latest manifestation of a trend which began with film and has progressed through television, video, and in the last few years, developments in multimedia computing. The design of synchronous combinatory exchange is necessarily unlike that of written exchange. The organizing principle of combinatory exchange in its simplest form is synchronicity rather than sequence (which is essential to all forms of written exchange). Both forms are linear to some degree– both rely on a time-line of expression. In written exchange, linearity is an overt feature of the expression. In the case of synchronous combinatory exchange, linearity is only covertly present since the elements of a synchronized combinatory expression must be aligned in time. In an analog environment this alignment creates a singular linear expression. In a digital environment, on the other hand, the expression may be multiple, may consist of a multiplicity of lines.

While historicism clearly must inform such a totalizing metaphor as Poster’s “mode of information,” Poster’s objective is equally clearly trans-historical:

the stages are not 'real,' not 'found' in the documents of each epoch, but imposed by the theory as a necessary step in the process of attaining knowledge. In this sense the stages are not sequential but coterminous in the present. They are not consecutive also since elements of each are at least implicit in the others. The logical status of the concept of the mode of information is both historical and transcendental. In that sense the latest stage is not the privileged, dialectical resolution of previous developments. In one sense, however, a sense that Marx anticipated, the current configuration constitutes a necessary totalization of earlier developments: that is, one cannot but see earlier developments from the situation of the present. The anatomy of the mode of electronic information . . . necessarily sheds new light on the anatomy of oral and print modes of information . . . . I prefer to consider the present age as simply an unavoidable context of discursive totalization, not as an ontological realization of a process of development.(6-7)

Theorizing

From within this context of discursive totalization, other possibilities suggest themselves. In A Thousand Plateaus (1970), Deleuze and Guattari propose a different history of written exchange. “Writing,” they claim, “has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (4-5). Their history is delineated in terms of types of books. There are three types of books, the first being historically the earliest and the third the most recent, but all three are coterminous in the present. The first type they describe as the root-book. The root-book “imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do” (5). The second type is the radicle-system, or fascicular root book. “This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development” (5). The approximate characteristics of Deleuze and Guattari’s third book type–the rhizome–clearly indicate a departure from the book as printed codex to electronically mediated exchange:

1. and 2. principles of connection and heterogeneity; 3. principle of multiplicity; 4. principle of asignifying rupture; and 5. principles of cartography and decalcomania.(7-9)

The significance of this taxonomy for this discussion is that its classification, unlike Poster’s, is entirely media-independent, gaining its meaning, so to speak, from a delineation of structure or design.

The root-book roughly corresponds to written communication prior to the development of the paste-up technique (which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as assemblage; 4) in the early part of the twentieth century. Its history is one of linear production. In its earliest form, the writing of the root-book was synonymous with its publication. Today, the production of the root-book is still characterized as a linear process consisting of five steps: 1. writing of a manuscript; 2. submission/editing of the manuscript; 3. the composition of the manuscript in type; 4. the proofing of the type sheets; and 5. the dissemination of the publication. The production process for the radicle-system book is much lengthier, requiring the addition of at least two additional steps, the first, the mock-up or layout stage normally falling between the second and third root-book steps; and the second, the paste-up stage falling between the third and fourth steps in the production of the root-book. In its earliest manifestations (and still today in the certain fine-printing and vanity publishing circles), the production of the root-book is characterized by oneness and stability. Even in its more recent manifestations, the root-book strives to be an exact replica of the author’s words, a representation or signification of an individual’s thoughts. Even as the production process has fragmented (through the intervention of editors, publishers, printers who are not the author), it has maintained its linearity. Likewise, the publication has retained its insularity and rootedness.

In contrast, the design of the radicle-system book is fragmented and multifarious, and while representation is still employed as an element, it is only one of many couched in layers that problematize its signification. Interestingly, the technology which initially enabled this kind of production was photography. The production process is less emphatically sequential, the organizing principle being collage or assemblage which allows for alteration and reorganization at almost every stage of the production process. In some cases this process has extended even to the composition of the manuscript itself, as in the case of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up texts, or, in a less mechanical implementation, in the poetry and critical writings of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Deleuze and Guattari describe a third type of book:

A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether . . . . Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers . . . . The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed.(6-7)

Telecommunications systems are rhizomorphic, as are computer networks. Think of maps you have seen and descriptions you have heard of the internet–a rhizome. If we accept the rhizome as a metaphor for electronically mediated exchange, then hypertext is its apparent fulfillment, and Deleuze and Guattari’s “approximate characteristics of the rhizome”– principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, and cartography and decalcomania–may be seen as the principles of hypertextual design.

Principles of Connection and Heterogeneity

The principles of connection and heterogeneity state that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be” (Deleuze & Guattari 7). In this sense a rhizome is very different from a tree structure, where the order is fixed by a hierarchy of relationships. Cognitive jumps, which must be mechanically forced in an hierarchy, are intuitively sustained in a rhizome. A rhizome is the only structure which can effectively sustain connections between different media without giving hegemony to language. Many current relational and flatfile multimedia database applications support the storage of multiple forms of media, and some will even display different types contiguously, but keyword searching is the only mechanism provided for cross-type searching. Like film and video, they support synchronous display (but then, so can the book, albeit with limitations), but they do not support nonverbal access. Traditional hierarchical database structures are even more problematic in their support of nonverbal expression. Meaningful formation of hierarchies across media boundaries can be accomplished only through the use of language, since hierarchy is itself a creation of language, and therefore, language is the only universal tool available within an hierarchical structure. A rhizomorphic structure, on the other hand, does not rely on language for its ordering, although many of the linkages in a given structure may be linguistic.

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages (7).

Hypermedia design is rhizomorphic in its sustenance of heterogeneous connection, because there is no systemic hierarchy of connection. The perception of connectivity is entirely left to the user, though the pre-existence of particular connections may foster varying user perceptions of overall structure. At its most political, connectivity is a democratizing principle. It functions as a structure of individuation since at any given moment the “center” of any rhizomorphic structure is the individual’s position in relation to that structure. Distinctions between author and reader, constituent and politician, even intermediary and end-user disintegrate as the reader participates in authorship, constituent in polis, and end-user in the search itself. At its worse, connectivity inspires anarchy. Witness (as we all did) the impact of limited connectivity (exclusive of the important element of interactivity) via the broadcast of a videotape of the arrest in the case of the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.

As the distinctions between participant/viewer, author/reader blur, the concept of authorship itself will be problematized. All paths through hyperspace are equally valid to the individual traveller. As the “reader” negotiates hyperspace he/she becomes a navigator–traversing established links to pre-existent nodes; but also an explorer–creating new links to previously known, but unrelated territories; a pioneer–venturing forth into uncharted realms; and a visionary–imagining and giving shape to the as-yet unknown.

Principle of Multiplicity

Act so that there is no use in a centre . . . .

–Stein, 63

A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature . . . . An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, much as those found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines.

–Deleuze & Guattari, 8

Hypertextual design is able to support non-hierarchical thinking and cognitive jumping because it recognizes the diversity of multifarious modes of information. Information may be structured hierarchically within a hypermedia system, but only to the extent that such a structure exists in a coterminous relationship with other structures. In other words, hypertextual design presupposes not only that multiple points of access are preferable to a single point, but by extension, that multiple structures are preferable to a single structure. Information retrieval studies have shown that a single user’s selection of access points for a given topic may vary over time and space, making it difficult for an indexer to predict potential user vocabulary. The principle of multiplicity is reflected in hypertextual design by the coterminous presence of varying modes of access to a single structure on the one hand, and of varying structures on the other.

Landow and others have noted the hypertextual nature of pre-hypertext literary projects from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants. Yet the lists I have seen are conspicuous in their omission of female writers and feminist critics, not to mention writers of color. I have already mentioned Rachel Blau DuPlessis, but there are others who might be mentioned as well–Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston–all of whom practice a writing of inclusion and fragmentation, of absent centers and centered absence. Multiplicity, as a hypertextual principle, recognizes a multiplicity of relationships beyond the canonical (hierarchical). Thus, the traditional concept of literary authorship comes under attack from two quarters–as connectivity blurs the boundary between author and reader, multiplicity problematizes the hierarchy that is canonicity.

Principle of Asignifying Rupture

Hypertextual design intuitively supports two forms of access which must be forced in hierarchical structures: user-generated access and mapping. The principle of asignifying rupture supports the former, and those of cartography and decalcomania, the latter. In an hierarchical structure, a user-generated access point may cause a rupture in the system. For example, in a database search, a user may, through the process of serendipity, arrive at a particular point in a hierarchy, even though her departure-point has no apparent hierarchical relationship to that arrival point. If she is allowed to introduce a link from her departure term to her arrival point into the hierarchy without further evaluation, the very structure of that hierarchy might well be undermined. One might view the project of feminist criticism in this light. The introduction of non-canonical texts and authors into the canon disrupts the foundations of the canon altogether. In contrast, hypertextual design encourages such disruptive activity while rendering it insignificant. Since the structure does not rely on any given theory of relationship, it cannot be affected by the characterization of a new relationship previously alien to it. The potential for any relationship exists within the hypertextual structure; some simply await unmasking.

Principles of Cartography and Decalcomania

The second form of access not easily supported within an hierarchy is mapping. Tracings or logs of an individual’s progress through an hierarchical database are of course possible and may help a user to retrace a given path, or provide useful data for research in human-computer interaction. Current maps of search paths exist in the form of recordings of transactions, though the best systems record only the user query and the system response, without making a record of the context of either query or response. The records thus constructed are divorced from context, non-relational, and perhaps most importantly, non-spatial. They are grammatic, rather than diagrammatic. They perpetuate the hegemony of language and de-emphasize the sense of a journey through space and time. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of mapping is, however, quite different, and presupposes the operation of the principles discussed previously.

Each user’s path of connection through a database is as valid as any other. New paths can be grafted onto the old, providing fresh alternatives. The map orients the user within the context of the database as a whole, but always from the perspective of the user. In hierarchical systems, the user map generally shows the user’s progress, but it does so out of context. A typical search history displays only the user’s queries and the system’s responses. It does not show the system’s path through the database. It does not display rejected terms, only matches. It does not record the user’s psychological responses to what the system presents. On additional command, it may supply a list of synonyms or related terms, but this is as far as it can go in displaying the territory surrounding the request. It can only understand hierarchy, so it can only display hierarchical relationships. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification (12).

A hypertextual map is more closely related to geographic maps than to search histories. It shows the path of the user through the surrounding territory, but always from the point-of-view of the user. It is as though the map were perpetually shifting as the traveller moved from one quadrant to the next. Some of that territory is charted–it is well mapped out in terms that the user understands, and connected to familiar territory or nodes–and some is uncharted, either because it consists of unlinked nodes that exist in the database much as an undiscovered island might exist in the sea, disconnected from the lines of transfer and communication linking other land areas, or as an unidentified planet in space, with the potential for discovery and even exploration, but as yet just a glimmer in the sky–or because it is linked in ways that are meaningless to the user in his present context. The user can zoom in on zones of interest, jump to new territories using previously established links or by establishing new links of his own, retrace an earlier path, or create new islands or nodes and transportation routes or links to connect them to his previous path or the islands or nodes charted by others.

The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory of central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states (21).

Hypertext is rhizomorphic in all its characteristics. Its power derives from its flexibility and variability; from its ability to incorporate, transmute and transcend any traditional tool or structure. Like the rhizome, it is frightening because it is amorphous. The hierarchical systems we are accustomed to are definitional–they are centers of power. Knowledge of the hierarchy engenders authority; corrupted authority breeds despotism. Knowledge of the rhizome as a totality is impossible, precisely because “totality” and other absolutes have no meaning in a rhizome. The rhizome is as individual as the individual in contact with it. It is that individual’s perception, that individual’s map, that individual’s understanding. It is also, and at the same time, a completely different something–another individual’s perception, another individual’s map, another individual’s understanding. It provides no structure for common understanding. It is a state of being, reflective always of the present, a plateau in a region made up entirely of plateaus–“a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze & Guattari 22).

Works Cited
- Altick, R. The English Common Reader. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.
- Bush, V. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-8.
- DuPlessis, R. Tabula Rosa. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1987.
- —. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New York: Routledge, 1990.
- Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
- Eisenstein, E. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1980.
- Landow, G. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
- Nelson, T. Dream Machines. Redmond, WA: Tempus, 1987.
- Poster, M. The Mode of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
- Stein, G. Tender Buttons. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, c1914.
- Vandergrift, K. “Hypermedia: Breaking the Tyranny of the Text.” School Library Journal 35:3 (Nov. 1988): 30-35.
September 25, 2013
Derrida/Fort-Da: Deconstructing Play
Alan Aycock

Department of Anthropology
University of Lethbridge
aycock@hg.uleth.ca

Jacques Derrida is a notably “playful” scholar, in two senses of the term. First, his writing style is playful, richly replete with the puns, circumambulations, excurses, hesitations, and gnomic recursions that make him a bane to his translators and a delight to his readers. Second, Derrida’s playful style reflects his argument that the Western metaphysics of presence may be deconstructed (as indeed, he believes that it “always already” is) by exposing the playfulness of differance, the constant motion of forces elsewhere in space and time.

From this point of view I find it somewhat ironic that despite the extensive use of Derrida’s ideas in numerous scholarly fields, no one has addressed the implications of deconstruction for the study of play itself.¹ To remedy this apparent oversight, I shall first present a brief discussion of Derrida’s treatment of the fort-da game described by Freud, and draw out several nuances of Derrida’s approach to this game which seem to me to be more generally applicable to play. I shall then offer five examples of the playing of chess, ethnographic situations that are familiar to me from many years of participant observation and writing about the game (Aycock, n.d.[c]). In each instance, I shall show how my characterization of Derrida’s approach illuminates the understanding of the play at hand. Finally, I shall evaluate, tentatively, the prospects and implications of a deconstructive approach to play, and suggest some directions for further research in this area.

Fort-da

The game of “fort-da” was invented by Freud’s grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955: 14-17). In the simplest form of this play, the child had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which he threw from him, murmuring “o-o-o-o,” then pulled back, saying “da.” Freud (and the child’s mother) interpreted the first sound as the child’s version of “fort” (“gone away”), the second as the German for “there” (as in English “there it is!”). Freud associated this game with the child’s attempt to assert mastery in play to compensate for an emotionally fraught situation where he had no control, his mother’s occasional excursions from the household without him (1955: 15). Freud also linked the empowerment of this early game with the child’s apparent lack of reaction to his mother’s death several years later (1955, 16, n. 1).

In general, Freud was using the fort-da game to illustrate the operations of the economy of pleasure that he had described, and to introduce the notion of the return of the repressed; that is, the neurotic effects of an earlier psychic trauma upon later behavior. As a preliminary to Derrida’s discussion of the game, it may also be noted that he perceives a resonance in Freud’s work here with the broad philosophical doctrine of the “eternal return,” which Nietzsche elaborated lyrically in his Zarathustra (e.g., Nietzsche, 1961: 159-163, 176-180). It is quite possible that Freud, who was familiar with Nietzsche’s work (Freud, 1955: 123-124), also made this connection.

Derrida turns this brief anecdote into a playful trope for Freud’s writings (Derrida, 1987a: 257-409), showing first how Freud repeatedly sends away and calls back his central argument on the pleasure principle as he tries to summon evidence to support it, then how Freud himself, as the writer of the play, conceals initially from the reader his genealogical relationship to the child as a convention of scientific writing, deferring his authorship by devolving it impersonally on an unidentified child at play. In “writing” his grandson in this fashion, Freud speculates not only on the psychic economy of pleasure, which must yield in the finest bourgeois terms more than is invested, but on the political economy of his own family, and of his own writing.

Derrida gradually extends this convoluted image into an analysis of the incompletion of the game (Freud believed that the only use that the child made of his toys was to “make them gone” [Derrida, 1987a: 311]), of his family (the child’s mother and father are mute and unidentified in this account), of his theory of pleasure (Freud never completely proved its existence to his satisfaction, but he never discarded it entirely, reworking it constantly throughout his life), and finally of the subject himself (Freud’s own death prefigured in that of his daughter). But Derrida is not done with the game, either (Derrida, 1987a: 1-256): he plays on “fort-da” in his love letters (whose messages go and return), in the pleasure of his love (which threatens to lose and find itself), in the uncertainty of writer and addressee (always incompletely known), and in the fort-da of his own theory of writing (set in eternal motion by the forces of differance).

Even this is not enough: Derrida plays upon the common etymology of the “legs” and “legacy” of Freud (Derrida, 1987a: 292), upon Freud’s reference later in the same work to “limping” as a halting fort-da of his legs/legacy of writing (Derrida, 1987a: 406), upon Derrida’s own limp acquired during an illness as a fort-da of his love and his work (Derrida, 1987a: 139, 141, 199), upon van Gogh’s paintings of shoes as a fort-da of “step/nothing” (both from the French pas) (Derrida, 1987b: 357), upon Socrates-Plato as engaging in an intellectual and erotic fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 222), upon autobiography and the genealogy of ideas as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 62; 1988: 70), upon Freud’s “scene of writing” as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 336), and upon the eternal return/return of the repressed as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 303).

The play of fort-da, then, occupies much the same analytical space in Derrida’s writings as the play of differance, because it substitutes the centrifugality of uncertainty for the centripetality of the Western quest for a transcendental signified. ² I am highlighting the game of fort-da here not as an opening to Freud’s own economy of pleasure, but as a device to illustrate and gain access to that which I take to represent most clearly Derrida’s approach to the ludic.

Several elements of Derrida’s use of fort-da stand out for my purposes. First, the margins of play talk, the “fort-da” of the child, open up to reveal themselves in talk which is not obviously about play: the writings of Freud, of Plato, and of Derrida himself. Second, the authoritative structure of the game exposes itself as always going “somewhere else”: the spool that is thrown away, the rigidly structured scientific writing that is always incomplete, the differance of Derrida’s own circuitous writing style. Third, the players’ subjectivity is always lost: the unidentified child and parents, Freud, Derrida’s unidentified lover(s), Derrida himself, Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche. Thus the differance of fort-da operates not to fix the game as a specific essence, but to defer the full apprehension of the ludic indefinitely, even as it is pleasurably experienced from moment to moment: “In order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules” (Derrida, 1988: 69). For Derrida, play is not fixed in finite discourse or structural symmetry or subjective intent: it happens, irresistibly, as a movement elsewhere of the traces of writing in the world (Derrida, 1988: 69).

Chess As Fort-da: Five Examples

To apply my reading of Derrida’s approach to fort-da, I adduce five examples of different forms of chess: casual play, tournament play, correspondence play, computer play, and skittles. In each case, my narrative is followed by a demonstration of the manner in which talk about play, the structures of play, and the self-awareness of the players themselves lead inexorably elsewhere, into the miscegenations of play that deconstruct its apparent authority.

I intend by so doing to interrogate the peripheries of play rather than its core, and thereby suggest that it may be possible to continue the play of signifiers precisely where a more traditional analysis would seek to arrest it. I take this subversion of the authority of these examples of play to represent a paradigm, however tentative and limited, of Derrida’s own playfulness: “this lack, which cannot be determined, localized, situated, arrested inside or outside before the framing, is simultaneously both product and production of the frame” (Derrida, 1987b: 71).

Casual Play

In the local public library an elderly man and a younger one set up the pieces and begin to play; at the same table, others are doing the same. After a few games, all of which he wins, the younger man proposes that they play with a chess clock (comprising two clock faces set in a single base which operate independently to measure the time taken by each opponent). The older man demurs: “I’ve played chess without a clock for fifty years, and I’m not going to start now. I enjoy chess because I don’t work at it, and to hear that clock ticking takes away all the fun.” The younger man hesitates, then says “ok, no problem; let’s play.” But after one or two more quickly won games he leaves, saying “I’ve got to get home now; thanks for the games.” The other players at the table look up to say goodbye, but continue playing for several more hours.

Is there “no problem” here? Everyone has followed the rules of chess, and observed the politesse of social discourse that surrounds it. There’s no dispute; no obvious disagreement about what’s going on here. But there is something which is carefully unthought in the situation, an authority that is rejected, and a presence which is an absence.

First, the talk of play. I intercepted the younger man on his way out of the library, and asked him why he had left. As I had suspected he would, he said “Look, there’s just no competition here. I beat the old fart six times before he had even castled. Using a clock might have narrowed the odds a bit, but he wouldn’t do it. So why hang around?” Thus the offer of a timed game expressed covertly a sense of the discrepancy between the two players, and even more fundamentally an expectation that chess is inherently adversarial. Had the younger man said as much, he would have insulted his partner. So he sought an agreement to change the circumstances of play, and was rebuffed. This makes us think, perhaps, about Derrida’s “Bab-el” [1988: 100-104], the translation of disparate terms into covenant, and the fort-da of relationships embedded in discursive situations.

Second, the structure of play. The “ticking” of a clock is an image, as the older man pointed out, of discipline and authority in bourgeois society (he had worked for many years as an air traffic controller, constantly harassed by fateful decisions that had to be made instantly). I have spoken at some length with the older man on several occasions. For him, the clock was an enemy: “I hate to be rushed; I’ve had enough of that.” Thus a refusal for the older opponent carried with it an absence, a retirement from work; for the younger, the rejection of the clock was a denial of his presence in modernity, life in the fast lane: “I want to get on with it: just hanging around and playing to be playing is bullshit.”

Third, the players. The role of player was perceived quite differently by the two men. The younger man saw the purpose of play as “beating up someone tougher than you; if I had a choice, I’d always play someone rated above me. If you can’t get the rush, why bother at all?” The older man wanted to “enjoy what I’m doing; I don’t care if the other guy is better, as long as he gives me a good game. Rating? Naw, that doesn’t matter.” In other words, the younger man was interested mainly in working himself into an absent hierarchy of competitors ranked above one another, perhaps even in a formal rating system (a four-number designation of strength determined by a mathematical formula [Elo, 1979]), while the older man was engaged by the egalitarian moment of play, its intuited experience. Each of them pointed away from the presence of the game; even the older man had “forgotten” the formal history of chess, which is often recited as a project of triumph of greater over lesser players (cf. Eales, 1985 for an instance of the way in which chess “heroes” insinuate themselves into what is intended as a more impersonal social history).

Thus the “traces” of casual play in this example show that it is always on the edge of being transformed into something else, the absent authorial signifiers of formal competition, ranking, and time. The players’ self- consciousness of play moved in and out of phase with one another, and the decorum that required the younger player to stay for an extra two games after his proposal to use a clock was turned down, and to thank the older man for the games that had not really been equally enjoyed by both parties was a marker not of present intention, but of absent transactions, the “unthought” of play discourse that nonetheless dominated its situation. Even the age of the players became a factor absent from the game in terms of the specific way that its rules constitute the play, but present also when the players’ structural position in their life cycles–the retirement of the older player and the immersion of the younger in themes of modernity–is considered.

Tournament Play

Here a younger man and an older man play in a highly choreographed scene: the room is a small stage raised above an audience of chairs filled to overflowing by players from the same round of this tournament, by spectators who are excitedly pursuing what they take to be consummate competition, and by a few journalists assigned to cover the event. The competitors have a table to themselves, and upon the wall above their play there is a vinyl over-sized board with velcro pieces that adhere to it, moved as the players move, in utter silence, by an attendant. At their side a clock ticks away the time until the time control: 50 moves in two hours (apiece), and 20 moves per hour thereafter. Each player has a printed form at his side upon which he records the moves in a special code, overseen by the tournament director who hovers at the margins of the play, more than a spectator and less than a participant.

The younger man has begun the game with a Queen’s pawn opening and the older man, a national champion of some decades earlier, has defended aggressively with a King’s Indian. By the middle game, most of the center pawns are interlocked and the pieces are maneuvering within that framework. At a particular point, the older player pushes a flank pawn unexpectedly and turns the game around: the older man goes on the offense and the younger man has to rearrange his pieces to defend what has suddenly become to seem a vulnerable and overextended position. As the game transpires, the challenger falls back into an enclosed space that he can not sustain. He forfeits a pawn to gain some room to maneuver, but slowly the former champion pushes him into a lost endgame, two Bishops and three Pawns against a Knight, Bishop, and two Pawns. When the older man finally breaks through to a winning position, the audience applauds and the younger man turns over his King in resignation. The players discuss the game in a postmortem with several bystanders who eagerly intrude their suggestions about alternative lines of play.

The talk: here rigid silence dominates, other than the audible undercurrent of the clock’s working, but the pieces “speak” for themselves during the game. As a proxy transaction of those who move them, they thrust and counter in a dreamlike counterpoint to the players’ imaginations (in their minds, the players are recapitulating another game, the opening, roughly eighteen moves remembered, of two Grandmasters in a match more than twenty years before). As a kind of deferral of the silent talk that prevailed during the game, the players play out a postmortem in which many divergent lines of play are seized and released (fort-da), each in its turn as it proves more or less workable: “If I move here, then you must . . . .” “But if you do that, then I . . . .” A bystander: “Your King’s-side attack was premature; you had to consolidate on the Queen’s-side first.” Their transactions are always formed in memory, and recalled in afterthought, as what might have been possible. Their game appears afterward in a printed text of the tournament densely annotated with many of the different lines that have been discovered, and will be reincarnated by other players, elsewhere as they challenge latterly this intertext of play.

Thus the talk of play exhausts itself along several seams of tournament chess: first as between the silence of the players and the voice of their pieces; second the disciplined quiescence of the room (the tournament director quickly hushes any conversation among the spectators, and the kinds of things that one player can say to another are specifically prescribed, e.g., “Check,” “J’adoube” [the traditional French word “I adjust,” to reposition a piece on its square without being required to move it], “Draw?”) against the tension expressed by the clock that counts down the moves to the time control; third, the relative tumult of the postmortem where numerous previously silent lines of play, many formerly unthought during the game, are then spoken and often are themselves contradicted; fourth, the publication of the play and its annotations against the future replaying of the opening in this game, which is itself a reprise of a past game.

The structures: tournament chess is apparently very highly structured. I have described elsewhere (Aycock, 1992[a]) the micro-physics of control that operates during formal play, including the many constraints set upon the motion of competitors in space and time, the segregation and passivity of spectators, the hegemony of the tournament director and the chess organizations that sanction play, even the pairings from round to round (this particular event was a national championship including hundreds of players that lasted ten rounds, and occupied nearly two weeks of the players’ time). But it is also pertinent to observe that any tournament game is only divided by a word, a movement, or a tick of the clock from a dispute that may embroil all present, and many who are absent (for instance, the sponsoring chess organization); in other words, the semblance of systematic respect for the rules of play that suffused my description in this instance is very tenuous, a quarrel carefully “unthought” by the participants (one of whom indeed became intensely involved in such a disagreement during a subsequent round).

Similarly, the structure of the play itself, taken as the configuration of pieces and pawns on the board, is always open to surprise, an intimation of structures disrupted. For instance, the King’s Indian opening that was used here is not a monolithic sequence of movements, but a family tree of potential excursions in which the displacement of a single pawn or piece has enormous implications all across the board (cf. Bellin and Ponzetto, 1990). A King’s Indian Averbakh, which was played, is wholly different in tenor from an King’s Indian Sdmisch, and even within the Averbakh there are important variations, each of which may be named according to the Grandmaster who prefers it or the place where it was first played (and often these names have yet further names attached to them to indicate subvariations, or are designated differently by players from other countries). In the instance of tournament play that I have narrated, the older man found a “new” move that he had in fact resurrected from a game that he had played thirty years previously, the venture of a flank pawn which set awry everything in its wake: “I wondered whether you had seen my game against Reshevsky.” “I just didn’t even think about that move; it didn’t seem thematic at all.” Even endgames, which are apparently simple because of the limited material on the board, and have been thoroughly classified (in a five-volume publication of many thousands of pages (Matanovic, 1982-) and analyzed extensively (sometimes by computers), bring the unexpected to bear in particular situations: “I thought if I kept all the pieces on the board, I could create some complications that offered drawing chances.” “I wanted to try losing a tempo (move) in that last position, to see whether I could get the opposition back and save the game.”

Thus each move is itself a trace of other opportunities ventured or foregone, and the perception or calculation of moves (which are two very different cognitive operations in human play [Aycock, 1990]) is a complex affair of faults and absences that becomes more problematic, not less so, as the skill of the players increases: “I tried to figure out what was going to happen when I moved the Knight to g5, but it was just too much, so I tried it and prayed.” “I couldn’t decide how you would respond if I pushed that pawn, but it looked right, so I just did it.”

Even the postmortem is a wilderness of deviant structures, many that are only discovered during the analysis that follows the game, and many whose impact cannot be assessed, but are marked with a “!?” or “?!” in the published text as possibilities to be pursued in other games. To take the notion of the postmortem one step further, at the highest levels of chess the players have trainers and seconds who study their own games and those of their putative opponents to find weaknesses and strengths that could be exploited in a match. Even in the less exalted national championship from which this game is taken, the strongest players had prepared not only a general repertoire, but also in some cases, for specific opponents who might or might not be paired with them. In other examples that might have been adduced (Aycock, n.d.[a]), the players had met across the board many times previously, and played their present game against a sense of absences, e.g., what their partner had been doing in recent games, how an opponent might react to a new or an old sequence of moves, whether the person involved was likely to be aggressive or conservative at that stage of the tournament. Thus structures of play are always, and have always been, deferred to and from other present situations of play; there is no transcendental signified, no perfect game to arrest the motion of the signifiers that I have discussed, and no abstract competitor against whom one always plays.

The players: in a very straightforward way it could be said that the division among competitors, spectators, and officials is exact at any moment of play; tournament rules capture this distinction with great precision (Aycock, 1992[a]). Even when these roles are relaxed during the postmortem everyone still knows who were the “authors” of play in this simple sense, a matter further attested by the results of play that are inscribed on the chart of opponents on the wall at the front of the tournament room, and the names attached to the published text of the game. In fact “serious” chess makes an extended effort, indicated among other things by the recording of moves made by each competitor during play, to identify and fix its origins.

Yet from what I have already said about this game it can also be observed that the players were not solely the masters of their own situation. They deferred, for example, the control of the circumstances of play to the tournament director, and beyond him to the organization that he represented, and even further to the rating formula whose advantage they desired (immediately after play, the younger man sat down with a calculator to figure out how many points he had lost; in a closed championship [where most, if not all of the competitors would have been internationally ranked], he would have been trying to sort out what overall score was still required to achieve an international norm). The tension in the room had to do at least in part with the breathless attention of the audience, “players” of sorts who constitute a stereotyped and generalized “Other” of the encounter. The players themselves took into account many absent factors respecting the intentions and self-presence of the players that I have already described: the previous games in which a similar opening was played and the styles of the players who played them, the manuals of middlegame style and of endgame technique, authored by yet other players, that had been studied for many hours each day, the suspicions harbored about the state of mind of the opponent. And as the postmortem dramatically displayed, the players had not intended their play either as a definite conclusion or as a comprehensive understanding of the results of specific moves.

Thus, as Derrida has argued, a text of play stands not only for itself but for many other things as well, since there is no one and nothing “outside of the text” who authorizes it of his/her free will. Indeed, there is a sort of Nietzschean flavor to the whole thing, where each player was the hero of his or her own myth, his or her “playing autobiography” (cf. Aycock, n.d.[a]), who lived out the “eternal return” (the endless replaying of a single opening variant, middlegame theme, or endgame arrangement) but who lacked the absolute self-presence to saturate the play: even the world champion loses once in a while, and lesser mortals must obviate their certain knowledge of victory as against the artifice of the tournament, else why play tournaments at all?

These traces of play, even in this highly regulated and harshly defined situation (very much a gulag of play, a strict regime of hard labor), express the movement of differance across a field of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980) that is contested and undermined at every point: who understands the play, how will domination be sustained if it can be at all, will the intentions of the players be realized? Always these traces evoke an incomplete presentiment of chess, although the constitutive rules govern the tournament situation just as comprehensively as that of casual chess. “Mastery” here becomes an irony to which everyone subscribes, and that reflects the desire that is summoned by its lack of presence: there is no final answer to any particular game, or to any of its phases, no matter who is involved. All of the answers, as I have demonstrated, are merely vectors to yet more questions.

Correspondence Chess

Recently when I was cleaning out the bottom of my closet, I came upon a bundle of letters that were written in the 60’s. Among them was my correspondence with a friend from high school, with whom I had played many games of chess over a period of six or seven years. We were quite evenly matched, and continued to play by mail after we left our home town to attend universities in different locales. There is, of course, a formal kind of correspondence play upon which I have reported elsewhere (Aycock, 1989), but here I shall draw attention to a more informal correspondence chess, which nonetheless shares many of the same features.

My friend and I played four games at a time, divided equally between White and Black. Unlike the more usual correspondence chess, we imposed no time limit; it was simply understood that a reply would be forthcoming as soon as possible given our heavy schedules of study. The games were inscribed in a code known as “algebraic,” where the chessboard is conceived as a grid of squares, each designated by a letter (horizontally, “a”-“h”) and a number (vertically, 1-8). Thus a move might be expressed as “d6-d7” or a capture as “d6xd7.” The code has the advantage of being unambiguous (for want of a more immediately personal context) by comparison with the descriptive notation that was more conventional in North America at that time.

In two of these games we had agreed to begin play from the 11th move of a well-known and highly tactical game, a King’s Gambit played by Boris Spassky against Bobby Fischer; in two others, we had decided to play a strategically more complex opening, the semi-Tarrasch variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. We had played these games against one another previously across the board as well as in our earlier correspondence, and the honors were about even.

In the particular letter that I am looking at, my friend begins with a short discussion of his life on campus and the courses that he is taking, then writes down his moves for each game. He comments on his move in the 2nd game, “well, I don’t know if this is getting me anywhere, but Fischer gave it an exclamation point in Chess Life, so here goes.” Then he pauses in the middle of writing his move in the 3rd game (thus: “h7-. . .”), and says “Excuse me for a little while, I’ve just been asked to play bridge by this guy from downstairs.” The next line continues, “There, that didn’t take very long, did it?” and adds ” . . . h6″). I’ll concentrate on these two passages for purposes of my analysis, which is of course much influenced by my reading of Derrida’s Post Card (1987a: 3-256).

First, the play talk is expressed by an interlocking sequence of discourses which include the personal remarks in the letter that have at best an indirect relationship to chess, references to a magazine article on chess and to a play event which interrupts the writing of the letter, and the code itself which speaks the move. The referents of each of these kinds of talk is hard to pin down: for example, I’ve never been to the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina (my friend’s school), I must once have had a copy of the Fischer article, but have it no longer, I’ve never played bridge with the “guy” downstairs, and even the code of the move is hesitant to identify itself without condition, in one case offered with a qualifier (“here goes”) and in the other case broken into in a way that’s impossible to visualize in “real” time (was the piece mystically suspended in the air over the board until my friend returned from his bridge game; was he even using a board and pieces to make his moves?).

The letter itself persists in time, though for all I know my friend is dead, since our correspondence has long since ceased. I didn’t throw away the letter, so it may be excavated by mystified archaeologists a thousand years from now if the paper has not decayed or the ink faded beyond recall. The letter also marks out its own space, sketches of a discourse that remains plausible after nearly thirty years, that could be (and perhaps has been) repeated on many occasions. In fact the very principle of the letter is the endless deferral and repetition of its conversations irrespective of our ability to locate it in a specific place and time.

Second, the structured authority of the play very readily loses itself upon its margins. These were not rated games, though they repeated rated games that we and others had played, and would play again; it was subject to no disciplinary gaze of a chess organization or tournament director, though we implicitly held certain constitutive rules of chess to be more or less constant, including among others the code in which it was written. Yet there is no constitutive rule of chess that allows the players to begin a game on the 11th move, and it would be a serious offense were players in a tournament to consult a magazine article or any other written text of play, including their own notes. Even the continuous sequence of moves that the constitutive rules of chess requires was interrupted in this writing, and the adversarial assumption that lies behind the play of the game was subverted by the confession of my opponent that he didn’t know whether he was playing a good move.

Was this writing of play simply a deferral, an inferior and secondary inscription of the oral authority of the presence of play (cf. Derrida, 1976)? Perhaps in one sense it was, yet writing the play offered quite a different set of textual resources than being there, e.g., stopping to play bridge with a different set of partners, playing four games at once, looking up (as we both did) “best” continuations of the semi-Tarrasch defense in the available chess literature.

To take another example of a possible transcendental signified that becomes problematic in the writing, it would be quite hard to locate the origin of our play: where did the Fischer-Spassky game begin (I seem to recall that it was later pointed out in Chess Life that the line advocated by Fischer in his magazine article had been “invented” at least a hundred years before), or the semi-Tarrasch (there was an early twentieth-century Grandmaster named Siegbert Tarrasch, but what on earth is a semi-Tarrasch)?

Finally, who were the players? I have already mentioned a couple of candidates for insertion at the margins of our game, such as the Grandmasters to whose names our play was affixed, or the “unthought” spectators of our play who might deliver the letter or dig it up latterly in a rubbish heap. Neither the addressee nor the signatory of the letter is secure, as Derrida has suggested: I have noted that I don’t know when or where my friend is now, but I didn’t then, either, though I accepted the usual conventions that associate the author of the play with the name of the correspondent who signs its written code, the Socrates-Plato matter revisited. And if I have the letter in my possession as I write these words, what does that demonstrate: am I truly reading it now, or was I reading it then, in some definitively authentic way? Is this present account of the play more serious than the original, or less so? Consider even the well-known scam, occasionally used as a plot device in novels or movies, where an amateur player bets on at least one victory in simultaneous games over two famous opponents, and merely transmits the move of the one to the other to win the wager. Can this be ruled out here, or in fact isn’t this very close to what actually happened–wasn’t my friend consulting Fischer to play me, and I to play him? But of course Derrida wants us to continue this argument for orality as well as for literacy, the “arche-writing” of which he speaks [1976: 56]. Thus in terms of the example I have given the uncertain traces of this correspondent play are no more derivative or false than the “spurs” of our personally present play: our intentions respecting the moves of this game and our respective abilities to guarantee its proper sequence were just as loosely connected to our self-consciousness in either event. Indeed, if we had been challenged to supply indubitable evidence of self-consciousness with regard to our play of these transacted moves, we would have had enormous problems doing so without setting ourselves in the flux of differance that is involved as I have indicated in the play of this particular game, let alone chess in general; again, the deferral of the intextuated self elsewhere looms just as Derrida has proposed.

Thus even the intimacy of friendship cannot guarantee that their transactions will be more assured of meaning than those of parties who are less well acquainted. In fact, it might be argued that the numerous contexts in which friends encounter one another become the stuff of the deferral of presence even more intensely than for those who have few such contexts, or none at all, since the values involved in any single encounter among friends become multiplied and unevenly focussed on that personal encounter (just as the fort-da incident reported by Freud). This does not lead, either for Derrida or myself, to a claim that the circumstances are meaningless or inscrutable; rather the problem is the reverse, that the meanings are too numerous and too easily scrutinized from every new vantage point to be comfortably situated in an ordinary version of empiricism.

Computer Play

I am presently playing a chess game with my son by means of an electronic mail system installed on the mainframes of our respective universities. He is not a chess player, or if so, he is only the rawest novice, vaguely aware of the constitutive rules of the game but not much else, and not particularly intent on repairing what to me seems an obvious deficiency. Instead, he refers the moves that I am sending him to a computer program that is also located on the mainframe of the university which he attends, and reports (I suppose, without any real evidence on my part, accurately) whatever the computer decides as his own move in the game.

Although we have agreed that I will test my own playing strength against my son’s computer program, he also understands that from time to time I may consult my own chess literature, and even that I might experiment with a chess program, the Chessmaster 2100, that operates on my personal computer. Thus from move to move the parties to the game may shift drastically from organic to silicate opponents. It should also be noted that neither of us is using a chess board and pieces to make our moves, although either of us could instruct our respective programs to print out a simulacrum of the position, and have done so when there was some uncertainty about the transmission of moves and the position at hand.

As our game has progressed, our e-mails which indicate the moves to be made have included side commentaries, much as in the correspondence games that I discussed above, not only about the game situation (“this is an English opening, but your program has gravely compromised itself by those silly Bishop moves”), but also about matters related to our jobs (“I’m an assistant operations supervisor now, with my own office, though I get mainly the shitwork”) and domestic circumstances (“are you coming to see us for Christmas?”). In fact, the latter have taken precedence over the game in recent weeks (“I’ve got this project to finish, so I guess I’ve got to earn my money”), and the game has been held in abeyance until more pressing duties are dealt with on both sides.

Where is the talk of play, and how is it configured? As in the correspondence games, the play “speaks itself” through our written message, but unlike those games, the writing seems to originate not just with the persons who are individually identifiable in a genealogical sense, but also with a computer discourse that carries with itself its own textual protocol. Being “online” is not merely a convenience which suits two people who are separated in space and time, but in addition a knowledge of procedures summoned from a source far beyond the immediate situation, such as in my case courses taken in “DOS.” Neither my son nor I can simply go to a keyboard and start typing, because both of us must conform to the established arrangements of our university mainframes that permit communication to occur within particular constraints, for example accounts, usernames, and passwords. Especially in terms of computers, the indelibility of the traces which inscribe a conversation is brought into question; if deliberate steps are not taken to “save” the words, the bourgeois gesture of finality, they may be lost forever in a kind of electronic limbo (cf. Heim, 1987: 21-22).

Similarly, the game itself endures only for as long as the memories of the mainframe and personal computer can be sustained; if the mainframe crashes, or the hard disk on my personal computer fails, then much of what has been transacted may be lost. Even the attempt to locate this memory within a special physical position, the hardware that underlies the communication, is subjected to the vagaries of telephone lines which transmit bits of information from one city to another. As every computer user knows, there are random glitches in these transmissions which can scramble the signals in progress and render them meaningless: “did you send ’14. d4-d5′?” “No, it was ’14. Ng1-e2′ and then ’15. d4-d5′.” Thus the talk of play in computer chess is mediated by the possibility of garbage introduced by those sitting at the computer keyboard or simply by the chaotic noise of the immediate universe, always threatening to lay waste (“trash”) the representations that are apparently intended.

How is computer play structured, and where is that structure brought into question? I have mentioned already that the protocols of computer use offer a structure which cannot guarantee the simple referentiality of the encounter. To give one example, both my son’s and my own mainframe system require users to sign a solemn declaration that they will respect the propertied interests, the copyright of particular authors, and obey the elaborate “Code of Computing” established by our respective universities. In my case, however, I must confess that some of the programs that I run on my personal computer have been “stolen” from their “rightful owners.” In electronic media, the ease of copying one program to another diskette has undermined this bourgeois sense of proprietorial closure (Poster, 1990: 73). From my son’s viewpoint, his conditions of employment, including the use of his university’s mainframe, proscribe its personal enjoyment, or at least accord game playing a very low priority that my son has, I suspect, sometimes circumvented. This resistance to institutional authority, pleasure against hegemony, is implicated in Derrida’s project of the deconstruction of writing, and in this case it is a potential which is readily available in the situation.

Our game obeys all of the constitutive rules of chess, and in fact the structure of the programs that we are using guarantees it; the computers will not permit an illegal move. Yet such a simple structuration is routinely dismissed in our play much as my friend and I did in our correspondence games, because we can comment on the play in a fashion that both brings its adversarial nature into question, and that places the play as a tracing of the background of other, more significant projects–our jobs and our families: “I just got an “A” on my combinatorics exam, and by the way, I am playing ‘8. c7-c6’.” We also have the capacity, that has been invoked throughout our game, to retract moves in order to follow a more interesting line of play: “Oh shit, this doesn’t work; let me try again from move 17.” This is not usual even for casual chess, and systematically betrays the notion that a movement of a piece or a pawn has some sort of lasting influence on play arising from personal presence. The lack of a “real” board and pieces underscores this sense of an encounter defined not by its presence, but by its absence in an otherwise identifiably empirical context.

The players, of course, are always those who may not be self-referentially present and intending or enjoying their game; I suspect that my son is humoring my peculiar obsession with the game rather than pursuing an activity that he himself values. Sometimes players are at a distance the guarantors of play, for example if I am making my move and writing it to my opponent. But from the other side of the game, the physically human author is a messenger only, even though I could scarcely reject his genealogical connection to me if I wished to do so. When I allow Chessmaster 2100 to reply to my son’s moves, we both become facteurs of the play. Does this mean that the computers are playing? They might be, but I know of no way to find out what they intend, or even if they “desire to win” in the ordinary sense of that phrase. If we don’t mean to say that players desire something, or anything, then what is really meant by a player?

In theory we could apply a Turing test (Levy and Newborn, 1991: 31) to the definition of player: “players” are those who transact the motions of the game in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish humans from computers. Forget that I, as an experienced player, could very likely distinguish the usual style of a computer’s play from that of a human, and let us consider whether the Turing answer is sufficient to disconcert Derrida’s model of differance. In the first instance, computers do not yet program themselves to play chess, nor do humans; the impetus always arrives from elsewhere, a programmer or a teacher (in the human case, usually a member of an immediate kin group, often a father [Parry and Aycock, 1991]), whose own programmability works in an infinite regression to many other origins, none of them terminable by any test that has been devised. No one spontaneously or self-referentially invents the moves of chess. Second, a Turing paradigm circumvents the intention and the desire of play in a fashion that Derrida would find agreeable. The play just “happens” for the Turing examiner, and that movement of play is both necessary and sufficient to make it real. Whether an embodied subject is the source of that play is left open for question. Finally, the actual play of a game is never fully determined by a Turing argument, because it is always assumed that following the constitutive rules is enough to accomplish the goal of locating “intelligence” that the Turing test addresses. In this situation there is a resonance of the Freudian “fort-da” game that should not be overlooked.

Yet actual games, such as the one that my son and I have undertaken, are not only a “black box” where moves go in and come out in a regular sequence. Games of chess have a particular style, even for novices, that is impossible to relegate only to their immediate conformity to its constitutive rules (Parry and Aycock, 1991). The meaning of “style” is not dissimilar in some ways to the medieval notion of “soul,” or to the more modern idea of the “real self,” as it might be transubstantially conceived (Aycock, 1990: 139): there remains a je ne sais quoi about a given game that overflows its authorial boundaries, but that lends to the play a pleasurable experience that is always somewhere else than merely in the recorded list of moves. Chess players have worried at length about the use of computers to contrive an “information death” of the game, but the quintessence of play, as Derrida has argued, resides always already beyond its realization in discourse that is immediately present. The play emerges from an uncertainty which is never encapsulated in its specific traces, but functions to inscribe those traces in the imagining of what might just happen next, or of the significance of what has already transpired. Nor is this a simple mystification of the human potential, because as Derrida has argued the moment of play is always arrested and released in an empirical circumstance.

Skittles

“Skittles” is a term used in chess to denote a kind of playing at play in which one or more of the standard rules of competitive chess is set aside to intensify the moment of the game (Aycock, 1992[a]). By far the most frequent form of skittles is the use of a chess clock to diminish substantially the time that players may take to make the moves of their game. As the time becomes shorter, players take ever greater risks, and rely upon the quickness of their wits and upon sheer luck to win. Chess is shifted in the process from, ideally, a game of perfect information and calculation to something closer to Derrida’s open-ended universe of traces. The device of that shift is a subversion of the bourgeois economy of the clock.

The situation is an empty tournament hall following the completion of the sixth round of a national championship. Since it is several hours past midnight, most of the players have completed their games and gone home. Half a dozen men of all ages and skill levels from strong amateur to titled master cluster around one of the hundred or so chess boards in the hall, playing ten-minute chess, munching on hamburgers and fries, and drinking soft drinks or coffee. As the term “ten-minute chess” suggests, each player has ten minutes for all the moves of the game. The person whose “flag” falls first (a red lever that is pushed erect by the minute hand of each clock, then drops when the hand reaches the vertical) loses irrespective of the material forces or the position then on the board. A common practise, which is followed here, is for one player to take on all comers until he loses, then to be replaced by another player who challenges the winner of that contest; the players take their seats more or less in rotation.

Tournament regulations such as strict silence and moving a touched piece are ritualistically reversed: the players freely “kibitz” their own games, while the bystanders join in the often ribald commentary. Touching or even moving a piece is not irreversible until one strikes the button that stops his own clock and starts that of his opponent. As the time limit approaches, the game builds to a frenzy, with players moving wildly, slamming their pieces off-center on the squares and hitting the clock with greater and greater force. Pieces that are captured are tossed aside, sometimes falling off the table to be caught or picked up by one of the bystanders. Even the clock is not exempt from this rough treatment, though chess clocks are relatively more expensive and fragile than the plastic pieces (another infraction of bourgeois norms, this time of commodification).

Eventually in this particular situation the most highly ranked and titled player present begins to win consistently. After some badinage (“It must be tough to be perfect” “Yeah, I hear that all the time”), he agrees to reduce his own time by one minute for each game that he wins, balancing the odds out a bit. He does not lose until he is playing with only a single minute against his opponent’s ten. At this point, everyone suddenly realizes that they are exhausted (earlier that evening each of them has played a strenuous tournament game lasting perhaps four to six or more hours), and the group breaks up to retire to their hotel rooms.

The play talk in this example is quite different from that each of the others. Unlike casual chess, politeness is deliberately avoided, as players comment rudely on one another’s skill and personal habits, as well as upon their own: “What a patzer!” “C’mon, get serious; I’m not going to fall for that!” “Holy shit, give me a break, huh?” Unlike tournament chess, noise is privileged over silence: “Ouch!” “Fuckin’-A!” “Auugghh!” Unlike correspondence and computer play, the talk is not incidental to the play, but part of its intensity: “What’s the matter; you too good to take my Rook?” “Well, I guess if you’re going to eat up my Queen’s-side, my King’s-side attack had better work; take the damn Bishop sac!” If the pieces speak for themselves, it is to share in the raucous tenor of the occasion, as they add their own clatter to the general turmoil. Thus in skittles more obviously than in the other forms of play that I have described the talk is confused with the action of the players, spreading out the game discourse over a much broader context that includes the braggadocio of the combatants and general colloquialisms of pleasure and disgust as well as the liberation of the ordinarily measured transactions of play. For instance, it’s not at all unusual in this situation for a player who has made a move and “punched” his clock to start making his next move even before his opponent has completed one in his turn; quite often two hands descend on the buttons of the clock simultaneously, sometimes with disastrous results for its mechanism.

The structures of the game, by the same token, are distorted to engage the players with the experience of the play rather than simply with its outcome. By contrast with the rigid discipline of the tournament round that was just completed, the skittles games are carnivalesque and have some of the characteristics of that resistant mode (cf. Aycock, n.d.[b]). Here the players have violated the spatial distinction that is normally made between the tournament hall as a kind of “sacred” context of serious play and the analysis room where such “secular” off-hand games are usually contested (Aycock, 1992[a]). The burlesquing of time constraints on play offers a patent contrast with the standard bourgeois economy of tournament time controls. The absence of a director (he was actually one of the participants, but was treated by all as just another player) removes the supervisory gaze of a sponsoring chess organization, though it is noticeable in any event that disputes in skittles are extremely rare. Finally, no one keeps score or computes ratings, so measurements of strength are entirely transient, claiming a sort of civil inattention (Goffman, 1963: 84) to the disparity in formal levels of accomplishment between the strongest and weakest players present.

Thus this skittles example represents notionally an “unthought” rejection of the limits or margins of serious play, and as well a complex refusal of the quiet relaxation of casual play (remember the younger man who became disgruntled when his older opponent would not use a clock in the instance of casual play). Skittles can be played without a clock, but most experienced players consider it rather unexciting. At the other end of the spectrum, tournament chess can be played with shorter time limits (for instance, games with an overall time limit of one hour) than those usually imposed by chess organizations, but it is only recently and after much debate that they have begun to be formally recognized as worthy of “serious” attention, such as the calculation of ratings or the award of titles such as the World Speed Chess Champion.

The sense of the chess “player” as such is also subtly decentered in skittles of the sort that I am describing, since there are not just two players involved in this example, but half a dozen who participate in the play both directly as they rotate to challenge the winner, and indirectly as they interject their commentary (“kibitzing”) while others actually move the pieces. The clock also becomes a participant of sorts, since it may dictate the result of the game irrespective of the situation on the board: a player whose game is hopelessly lost from a material or positional standpoint will nevertheless continue to move his pieces around (“just thrashing about”), desperately trying to stave off checkmate until his opponent runs out of time and loses “on the clock.”

Another critical factor is that the players, however they are to be defined, do not intend or guarantee the text of their play. Instead, players will attempt wildly unsound opening gambits or middlegame sacrifices, knowing that it is virtually impossible to respond to them as systematically as in tournament, or even in casual play. For instance, in one of the games of this sequence a player sacrificed his Queen for a Bishop and Knight in an otherwise relatively quiet position. His opponent stared dumbfounded at the board for a precious two minutes, then panicked and tried to realize his material advantage before his flag dropped. He wound up blundering away yet another piece in a couple of moves, and resigned in good-natured exasperation (not just by turning over his King quietly, but by suddenly gathering the pieces at the center of the board in a sweeping two-handed gesture) when he saw that he had placed his King and Queen in a position to be forked by his opponent’s Knight. The rupture of normal transactions and of the assumption of rationality that lies behind them (Aycock, 1992[a]) is a common feature of the displacement of intentionality in skittles.

Again, though players draw upon their skill and knowledge of the game, as in other forms of play, the instant recall of variations and themes that is involved in skittles works against players’ capacities to search thoughtfully for a specific authorization of a given opening or end-game technique that is associated with an ancestral champion of that style; this contrasts sharply with the correspondence and computer play that I have discussed, where chess literature is openly consulted to evoke the “best” line of play. Thus the authorization of play is as radically indeterminate in skittles as in the other instances of play, but for rather different reasons. The “arche-writing” of play amid personal presences, of which skittles appears to be an ultimate exemplar, is not necessarily freer of traces or absences than the “phonetic” writing of correspondent or computer play.

Conclusion

I have attempted in these five examples of chess to deconstruct what is ordinarily meant by the ludic. As I understand deconstruction (even in the excessively narrow, naove and demotic form that I may have deployed it here), this means that I have proceeded from an assumption that play is evoked not by a simple, measurable presence of speaking, structure, and self-awareness in particular meaningful situations. Rather, the ludic in the instances that I have given seems to trace or inscribe itself upon absences, the force that differs and defers meaning always already somewhere else beyond the immediate ken of the participant observer and of those who are the constructed “Others” of ethnographic analysis. It then becomes much more difficult to ground simple empiricism in the “real,” which reveals itself not simply as a given, but as a central problem and task of study.³

First, the talk of play does indeed seem to lose some of its solidity as I explore its role in different forms of chess. The casual players were talking about one thing, and meaning quite another when they debated whether to use a clock, and exchanged farewells at the conclusion of their games. Tournament players speak with their play alone according to the strict rules of competitive chess, but when they do so they are implicitly voicing the potential disruptions of that regime, and aligning themselves with many alternative directions of play that may emerge in their training for a tournament game, or in the postmortem that succeeds it. Correspondence players can, and in the nature of their play, often do defer their coded transactions to the interruptions of present circumstance or to the archaeology of closet dibris. Computers are programmed to speak the play in electronic signals, but they cannot sustain a linear discourse without the complicity of many other figurations that have little directly to do with the game. Even skittles players, the most immediately focussed of all chess participants, interweave their games with a barrage of words that make the game something other than that which is prescribed by its constitution. Time and space, in all five examples, are elements of the “babel” of play that render its meanings untranslatable in the most direct sense and thereby interrupt its covenants.

Second, the structures of play surround it and seem to fix its situation in deterministic, readily discernable contexts. But casual players may contest the structure of a game with clocks, and thereby resist unbeknownst to themselves the straightforward exchange of polite formulae of disengagement. Tournament players inhabit a highly structured event, though they may at any moment bring into question its institutionalization by disputes that call to account and sometimes undermine the authority of the director. Although tournament play is symbolically rationalized in numerous ways, those claims on structural authority are always subject to equivocation about the best play, and indeed the point of tournament chess is to overwhelm a particular positional structure by divergence toward unanticipated movements in an opening, middlegame, or endgame. Correspondent play uses writing as a resource rather than as merely a constraint of the relationship between players, and points to a reevaluation of structure (beginning on move 11, or consulting the Fischer article) as a way to play upon intimacy and to vanquish distance (the obtruding bridge player). Computers are physically structured to maintain the play in sequence and along acceptable lines, but they can be deprogrammed, as it were, by random noise, by circumvention of the “codes of conduct” of their authorizing agencies, or by an agreement of the parties to arrangements that were not originally contemplated. Skittles, finally, foreordains its deviance from the structure of the tournament or even of casual play, and encourages a catastrophic occlusion of time, touching, speaking, and rational calculation, all of which are apparently inherent in other forms of competitive chess.

Third, the players of chess work not only within the limits of the game, but beyond to express their broader roles which intrude upon its play. In casual play, what the players experience and intend is sometimes concealed and oftimes contradictory, dependent in part upon identities which arise from a position in their life cycle or an attitude toward the fast tempo of modern life. Tournament play expressly segregates authors of the game from its spectators, but relieves that distinction in the postmortem. More importantly, serious competition requires an ongoing relationship of the players with their predecessors and successors, trainers and seconds, and in addition defers their responsibility for the conditions of tournament play to a tournament director who represents an absent player, the organization that attempts, with rather uneven success, to guarantee that its conditions are acknowledged. Correspondents routinely admit their subservience to texts of play that are only tangential to the situation of their games conceived in terms of personal presence, and the literate circumstances of correspondent play divert attention from personal presence to authorizations that are potentially far removed in time and space from the material basis of their transactions, the post card or letter that bears its moves (is the “guy” who wants to play bridge not a player in my chess game with my friend, and if not, how is that to be demonstrated?). Computers confess a range of players whose own biochemistries may be entirely alien from one another, and whose intent or desire is, to say the least, highly problematic. Finally, skittles is an enterprise where players sometimes collude, often diverge, to create the semblance of a game. The relaxation of normal constraints upon authorization in skittles paradoxically invokes new and diffused authorities, the clock, the kibitzers, the sauvage style that skittles players tend to adopt as an intimation of their personal identities.

I must now consider whether a deconstructive approach to the study of play, as I have here characterized it, is sufficiently promising to continue work along similar lines. In a sense, there is very little involved in deconstruction that could not be accomplished by careful examination of traditional ethnographic assumptions (Aycock, 1992[b]) about the play, the players, and the role of the observer. Yet one important value of a deconstructive approach is to suggest that a figure-ground reversal of what is normally meant by the ludic and the serious may refocus attention on problems that could otherwise be taken for granted. In particular, it becomes possible to reformulate the instances of play that I have described as specific contexts of a more global problem of authority in Western cultures, ludic, scholarly or otherwise.

For example, familiar symbolic oppositions such as “culture-nature” and “order-disorder” take on an entirely new significance if the search for what is “real” is, deja aussi, a point of departure for analysis, because the fort-da of the human sciences is then shown to be at least as uncertain as human experience itself. We should not, from this perspective, be complaisant about adopting a deconstructive approach, but we should be aware that it offers a continuing challenge to more conventional notions. Thus competitive chess is for many in Western culture the ideal image of a “factory of reason” (Aycock, 1992[a]), which may lead a deconstructive analysis to reflect in general upon reason and its limitations.

Again, anthropology has invested itself with the Western conception of human knowledge as a progressive narrative that begins, continues, and flourishes interminably in Time (cf. Fabius, 1983). Chess shares with anthropology this sense of the limitless expansion of knowledge, an endeavor made “real” by the experimental attitude of serious competitors towards lines of play that are to be tested, discovered, renewed or discarded, and incorporated into volumes of games studied by each player as part of an autobiography of style (Aycock, n.d.[a]). Yet deconstruction causes us to hesitate in our easy affirmation of this progress. Like Foucault, Derrida works against the comfortable presumption of knowing the play–whether as players or as ethnographers–by relating it also to epistemological problems that are riddled through and through by contending gestures of empowerment and alienation.⁴ If you think about the “King’s Indian” not just as the name of a specific text or pattern of play, but as an image of authority, it suddenly becomes quite clear why a deconstructive approach might be provocative.

Finally, there is an aesthetic as well as an ethical dimension involved in deconstruction which might be generalized for those who labor in the human sciences, or indeed in any Lebenswelt where diverse values have become relevant (and where have they not?). There is, obviously, an important ontological debate evoked here, the familiar “is/ought/seems” trichotomy that Derrida particularly seeks to address. Thus, a deconstructive approach conflates the author, reader, and text in rewarding ways: who would have thought, before Derrida, that the variants of chess were meaningful not just as immediate transactions of a game, but also as forces of a cosmic kind of play interwoven by differance amongst a texture of the Western search for authorial presence? Feeling, knowing, and desiring the play, in this sense, cannot be held apart from one another, nor should they be: games are “world-building activities” (Goffman, 1961: 27).

The possibility of a coherent deconstructive approach is, of course, something of a contradiction in terms: differance lends itself most readily to pluralism, not singularity. In the very effort to write of a peripatetic style such as Derrida’s in the linear form of an essay, one despairs of closure. It seems to me, nevertheless, that if the conceptual issue is radically undecidable, the practical problem is not. All that I intend here is to suggest that at this moment, for these instances of play, I can offer a simplistic account of Derrida’s thought that seems to go beyond ordinary limits of ethnographic analysis.

Thus even the five examples of play related above afford a venue for more sophisticated study. An important direction for further analysis would deconstruct not only the immediate situations of play, but also, more comprehensively, their institutionalization. Another problem that I have glossed over in my analysis is that of mass-mediated play, which deserves a deconstruction all its own. Yet a third issue not dealt with in this essay is the relationships of play to engenderment, race, nationalism, commodification, and the post-colonial milieu of “carceral” society. Fourth, the contrivance of playful biographies is implied, but not directly brought to the fore in my arguments. Finally, a careful tracing of the economies of pleasure associated with these four issues would invoke more directly the Freudian fort-da transaction as it has actually been deployed by Derrida in his work. All of these represent the “unthought” in my discussion, and thereby implicate as yet unspoken, and more thoroughgoing deconstructions.

I have tried to show here that when we take the ludic as ludicrous, we have in some ways revealed a credential for analysis rather than only a means, finally, to discredit it. Derrida, typically, steals my last words and makes a game of them: If the alterity of the other is posed, that is only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the “constituted object” or of the “informed product” invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be “posed.” Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded…differance (1981: 95-96).

Notes

1. The extent to which deconstructive approaches have become entrenched in the human sciences is suggested by this lengthy list of subject headings, taken from a major North American research library, in which “deconstruction” appears as a key word: architecture, education, feminism, film criticism, history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, painting, philosophy, social psychology, sociology, and theology. Surprisingly, anthropology is not included, though one need not distort the “writing culture” debate (e.g., Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus, 1986) too much to perceive a deconstructive intent.

2. Think of Derrida in this sense, perhaps, as a master of Japanese “Go” (more evocatively in Chinese, “wei-ch’i,” the “surrounding” game): finely shaped colored stones are moved, insouciantly as if of their own accord, to circumscribe paths of influence that command the empty board without filling it (Korschelt, 1965: ch. III).

3. See also Hayles (1990: ch. 7), who perceives a modern alliance of deconstructive trends with another ultra- empiricism, chaos theory.

4. Like Swift’s Laputans who carry with them on their backs a bundle of objects so that they can converse by holding forth one after another with no possibility of misconstruction (Swift, 1945: 170-171), Derrida burlesques the comfortable assumption that we know what we are talking about at a particular moment. To extend the satiric image, I suggest that Derrida occupies the role of the servant who walks just behind one of Laputa’s meticulous philosophes with a bladder affixed to a stick, flapping it against his sense organs from time to time to return his attention to the dangers and resources of the “real” world (Swift, 1945: 144-145).

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- Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Cambridge, ENG: Polity Press (1990). Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Garden City, NY: Doubleday (1945).
September 25, 2013
Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance
Wendy Wahl

Department of English
University of Vermont
w_wahl@uvmvax.bitnet

High technology networks make possible the deluge of texts surrounding us. We swim in the flow of information, and are provided with (or drowned within) interpretations and representations. High technology has changed the way capital functions, and makes possible the electronic format of this journal. A new relationship between bodies and technologies is, seemingly, unprecedented in modern capitalism. Donna Haraway, in her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), writes of a post-natural present in which “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are frighteningly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (152).

After all, the human capacity to generate or make sense of information has been surpassed by computers, and challenged by the deluge of texts (literal, aural, visual) that surround us. Baudrillard’s response to this deluge is triggered by a quick spin of the radio dial: “I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard” (132).

Theorists from many disciplines are engaged in the process of articulating the function and effects of high technology; many have argued, as Baudrillard has, that the human condition has been transformed by the encounter with the unique and unprecedented power of high technology. Assuming a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology is dangerous; this assumption obviates important precedents that may help us to strategize some resistance to a “gradual and willing accommodation of the machine” (Gibson, 203). Freud’s clinical methods, and his construction of the relationship between patient and therapist, for example, are strikingly similar to the current encounter between bodies and technologies. A look at Freud’s account of his treatment of Dora makes obvious this decidedly low-tech version of a “deluge of texts,” and shows the way in which this therapeutic construct incorporated resistance. What are the possibilities for resistance to this new deluge? This question has provided the impetus for a vital, and absolutely necessary, discussion of strategies. As I will show in this essay, these responses are symptomatic of the failure of resistance to technologies of the early twentieth century. Strategies of resistance are often incorporated into systems, strengthening that which is being resisted. Juliet Mitchell has described the function of this resisting space: “[Resistance] is set up precisely as its own ludic space, its own area of imaginary alternative, but not as a symbolic alternative. It is not that the carnival cannot be disruptive of the law, but it disrupts only within terms of that law” (Mitchell, 1982).

I hope to provide some strategies, and historical warnings, that may help one actualize and resist power at a time when the possibility of doing so seems dismal. Haraway reminds us, with hope and pragmatism, that “we are not dealing with technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people” (165). This “historical system” includes the interaction between bodies and technologies and the implications of these encounters, which are referred to in this essay as “cyborg politics.” The origin of cyborg politics doesn’t begin with the late twentieth century, however, but with the broad tradition of positing scientific and technical solutions to free humans from pain and to solve problems of the human condition, particularly problems that originate not with the machine or technology, but within the body. Foucault has given us a description of the emergence of bio-technical power in the seventeenth century; his description of this power maps onto our twentieth- century concern with bodies and technologies:

Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy" of power, a technology.(206)

Within an early twentieth-century Foucaultian formation, Freud emerges as the mental technologist and industrialist, producing the truth of mind and body within the critical tools of psychotherapy. Freud constructed a method whereby the mind, largely abandoned to the world of religious therapies, was treated by empiricists, and built upon the work of the psychiatrists of the French school: Charcot, Georget, and Pinel (Goldstein, 134-166).

Psychotherapy was a new disciplinary technology, unique unto science because it treated the mind as a machine (a method previously visited upon the body). Freud ushered in the Western twentieth century with this industrialist approach to the soul, fracturing the inner self in two: “conscious” and “unconscious” drives. Within this new science, and in Freud’s clinical approach, the Cartesian dualism of mind/body breaks down: “mind” has been divided into conscious/unconscious. As a result, “mind” is no longer one unitary term that can correspond to its binary opposite, “body.” This disruption could be promising: mind/body corresponded to male/female, and it would seem that this pair of binary oppositions would no longer be able to function with respect to gender. Yet this deconstruction of oppositional pairs serves to strengthen others, and raises some thorny questions for Freud’s treatment of Dora.

What, then, becomes of the relationship between mind and body within the Freudian construct? If there is a disruption of the mind/body dualism when the “mind” has been fractured into two distinct entities, how does this affect clinical practice? Freud changed these pairs or, at the least, expanded the way they function: the patient’s experiences, as described by the patient, were informed by the unconscious mind in a way that was not evident to the patient. In deconstructing the mind/body separation, Freud constructed a new oppositional pair in its place, that of the conscious/unconscious. The relations between the conscious mind and body were obvious to the patient, but those were less important for fixing the machine than was the relationship between the unconscious mind and body. If this relationship was the arbiter of the body’s functions and of the conscious mind, how could one go about fixing it? One couldn’t; a therapist had to be called in for repair. The “unconscious” drives were given over to the interpretation of the therapist. In treating the machinery of the mind, Freudian therapists were given the interpretive duty of constructing desire and representing the inner self. Philip Reiff, in his introduction to Dora, captures the perfect circularity of Freudian psychotherapy as enacted in clinical practice:

By presuming the patient incapable of an impartial judgment, the therapist is empowered to disregard the patient's denials.... A patient says: "You may think I meant to say something insulting but I've no such intention. . . . From this the analyst may conclude, "So, she does mean to say something insulting...."(15)

It is also evident in Reiff’s description that resistance against a therapist is incorporated, and neutralized, within therapy. The Freudian therapeutic situation is a cybernetic network in which resistance functions to support the system. It is in this clinical practice that any potential disruption of dualisms promised in Freudian theory were recuperated. That Freud has constructed an impenetrable defense for the therapist is obvious. In retrospect, it’s easy (albeit reductive) to view Freud’s incorporation of resistance into therapies (as a prerequisite for therapy) as a frustrated empiricist’s attempt to fit the mind into the structure of empiricism.

The patient/therapist opposition was constructed in place of the mind/body opposition, and re-enacted as male/female. Perhaps Freud’s construction of an impenetrable position for therapists, and an utterly penetrated position for patients, created a backlash against the material moment when male/female became disengaged from mind/body. At any rate, the context is utterly changed for a patient of psychotherapy. The beginnings of an answer to the question of gender difference in the therapist/patient relationship lie in asking the following question: Who is treated and why? Men were rarely caught on the “penetrated” side of the therapist/patient relationship. Although male/female no longer enacted mind/body, another structure excluded men from needing this interpretive therapy: the impetus for treatment is resistance on the part of the patient. Philip Reiff characterized the category of patient in his introduction to Dora when he wrote that, “the neurotic makes too many rejections” (16).

Although men were no longer excluded from the category of patient, having unconscious drives themselves, the prerequisite for treatment was often hysteria or neurosis. Hysteria was a term used to categorize actions seen, historically, as being particular to women, although Freud and the Paris school’s characterization of hysteria did not expressly exclude men. Jan Goldstein has documented that hysteria was flirted with by most of the nineteenth-century French male novelists, and she argues that the literary interest in such a disease “included as one of its components a fascination with this ‘otherness,’ a tendency to recognize in it aspects of the self and to enlist it in the service of self-discovery” (138). Goldstein’s theory would also explain why Flaubert never entered into therapy, despite identifying himself as an hysteric. In his fiction, Flaubert wrote of hysteria only through female characters, as did all the other French novelists mentioned in Goldstein’s essay.

Dora’s treatment, after all, was not in the interest of self-discovery, but in the interest of her father. Dora had been brought to Freud in an effort to get Dora to accept her father’s affair with Frau K. The father also needed Dora to respond to Herr K so that he could get his game of partner-swapping to continue to go smoothly: he attempts to swap “partners” with Herr K by offering his daughter, Dora, to Herr K, in exchange for Herr K’s wife. This play of substitutions, begun by the father, certainly asks to be seen as a machine. This is a desiring machine in which substitutions can be made: there are slots to be filled (so to speak) that eclipse an individual desire to be in that position. This is particularly true in Dora’s case. When Dora was put into treatment, Freud writes that “[s]he objected to being pulled into the game entirely, at the same time she was fascinated by it and wanted to play” (34). By the time treatment had begun, Dora was suicidal, and had been resisting Herr K.’s advances, the first of which occurred when she was 14 years old. “He suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips. This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust and tore herself free from the man . . .” (43).

Freud writes that “the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical” because she did not have the “genital sensation which would have certainly been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances” (44). Dora’s resistance to Herr K.’s advances provided Freud with the cornerstone of the psychology of the neuroses: reversal of affect. Without Dora’s bodily resistance to Herr K., Freud would never have been able to treat her in the first place. Without Dora’s repeated verbal resistance to Freud’s suppositions, he couldn’t have written in the “repressed” desires for nearly everyone in the “game.”

Interestingly enough, in his interpretation of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Freud didn’t perceive any indications that this approach could inhibit treatment by negating the patient’s interpretations. Freud’s textual analysis of the Memoirs, titled “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”, ignores the obvious: Schreber is able to treat himself via his own process of writing and interpretation.

Schreber writes of his “gratitude” toward Professor Fleschig, his doctor, for helping Scheber to recover, but in a manner “so hedged with doubts and reservations that it subverts the expressed appreciation” (Chabot, 16). Schreber doesn’t give credit for his recovery to the doctor who was in charge of his treatment, and blames this on the doctor’s inability to recognize his patient as “a human being of high intellect, of uncommon keenness of understanding and acute powers of observation” Memoirs, 62). What does this tell us about Freud’s understanding of Schreber’s treatment? Freud didn’t extrapolate Schreber’s therapeutic process to his own clinical method; he ignores that Schreber’s experience points to the healing power of a patient’s interpretation. The patient’s story, moreover, must not be systematically negated, as in the treatment of Dora.

C. Barry Chabot examines these texts in his book Freud on Schreber, and writes that “Schreber’s understanding of his experiences . . . evolved with his progress on the manuscript: the act of writing was for him an act of revision”; “[m]oreover, writing his memoirs, an act that . . . played a role in [Schreber’s] eventual release from Sonnenstein, was itself restorative” (7). Schreber produced texts, as Freud did. Schreber’s ability to heal himself is evinced in the act of writing his Memoirs: Schreber’s “revision” and interpretation of his own experience is the therapeutic process by which he heals himself. Chabot makes a compelling case for the clinical and literary interpretations as being intertwined, such is “the nature of the interpretive process, be it literary or clinical” (11).

It can be argued that Dora does produce her own narrative, but this is used by and subsumed within Freud’s interpretation in clinical practice and, more permanently, within Freud’s written texts. Schreber’s interpretation existed outside of the formal or institutional therapy he received. Freud’s textual analysis of Schreber’s memoirs was just that: a textual exploration outside of clinical contact with the patient; as such, Freud’s analysis never affected Schreber. In Freudian clinical practice, the interpretive process that Schreber used to successfully treat himself would have been used against him by the therapist. Reiff writes that Freud “speaks of using facts against the patient and reports, with some show of triumph (this is no mean adversary), how he overwhelmed Dora with interpretations, pounding away at her argument, until Dora…’disputed the facts no longer.’ Yet these facts were none of them visible; they were all of them of the highest order, taking their life from the precise truth of Freud’s multiple analytic thrusts into her unconscious” (16).

The act of interpretation was the province of the therapist alone, and was used to engulf the patient with “indisputable facts.” These critics continue to argue for a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology, yet the “invisible facts” referred to by Reiff could easily characterize Baudrillard’s vision of the late twentieth century: “In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extension of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies” (132). This “forced injection” into Baudrillard’s as-yet- unpenetrated interior mimics Freud’s act of “pounding away” at Dora with his interpretations. Baudrillard’s profile of the new subject, assaulted on all sides by “those who want to make themselves heard” doubles for the Freudian patient: “He is now a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence” (133). What Baudrillard can’t accept, obviously, are the multiple “thrusts” into his neutral terminal. Using theory to play with the loss of his private past and with the disruption of his position as subject, Baudrillard recalls Flaubert’s flirtation with hysteria.

Fredric Jameson’s response to the problem of subjectivity also evokes the nineteenth-century French novelists; he writes that “only by means of a violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ which is our capacity to organize and live time historically” (523). In arguing for some sort of analytical prowess of which we are not capable at the moment, Jameson is putting the hope for a solution in a neo-Freudian construct: if we could only think ourselves away from the matrix, it would no longer penetrate us. This may be possible for Jameson or Baudrillard, but what about Haraway or myself? I mistrust that totalizing logic which would also exclude me; as a woman, I am linked by the system of significations to that repressed “other” against which this new “narrative dislocation” is posed. Baudrillard’s nostalgia for a private past, and Jameson’s characterization of the current condition as a sickness (needing analytic therapy), exclude the object, locating interiority once again within their experience.

The pentrator/penetrated relationship is gender-neutral in Freudian theory but enacted as male/female in clinical praxis; will Baudrillard’s theoretical loss of subjectivity be recuperated in the practice of technology? The reaction to no longer being excluded from the category of patient or hysteric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century parallels the reaction of men in this late twentieth century who are no longer excluded from the category of “penetrated.” This reaction is utterly significant: in a backlash against inclusion (signaled by the paranoid reactions of Flaubert, Jameson, and Baudrillard), the function of Freudian therapy Dora) and technologies of the bodies Neuromancer) is to keep gender opposition active. It’s a fascinating pattern: Baudrillard’s paranoid reaction to being a receiving terminal, penetrated continually by the hegemony, should be a warning for cyborgs seeking to strategize resistance to high technology. Even more symptomatically, Paul Virilio has declared: “We must take hold of the enigma of technology and lay her on the table” Pure War).

It’s dangerous to argue for a material uniqueness in the function of the panopticon, precisely because it prevents us from recognizing this continuing pattern of discipline and resistance, especially the way in which certain types of resistance are codifed to support the disciplinary society. Is there any space in a postnatural future for a female subject with interiority? Is it possible for a reading to occur which locates women in the position of subject? Although the human capacity to generate or make sense of facts and information has already been surpassed by computers, resistance to the matrix may work for Baudrillard. In William Gibson’s cyberpunk manifesto, Neuromancer, the (bachelor) machine incorporates high technology differently than the body does. The technologies of which Baudrillard speaks have been seamlessly incorporated to liberate men from their bodies and, as such, the mind/body paradigm is reclaimed as male/female with chilling results. That Neuromancer was intended as an historicized future is evident in Gibson’s description of the novel: What’s most important to me is that it’s about the present. It’s not really about an imagined future. It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live” (Rosenthal, 85).

Gibson’s work, based as it is on the present encounter with bodies and technologies, should inform any speculation or theoretical vision of our future. Pam Rosenthal describes Molly and Case, the heroes of the novel, as part of “an elite cult” who feel “an existential righteousness about diving into the matrix, braving its dangers, getting as close as possible to the shape of algorithms that come about as close to truth as anything does in the bad new future” (90). The access to information, and the surveillance tactics used to gather it, rests with multinational corporations (zaibatsus) in Neuromancer. Elite status is signaled by access to information in the hierarchy of the matrix in Neuromancer: getting in to the cyberspace of invisible facts equals power, and “not to be able to jack in [to the matrix] is impotence” (Rosenthal, 85,102). Molly’s experience of the matrix is fundamentally different from Case’s; the difference is informed by constructions of gender, although their resistance to the matrix (and zaibatsus) makes both of them more malleable and exploitable by the companies that control the matrix.

Neither Case nor Molly want the life of the “little people,” or, as Case puts it “company job, company hymn, company funeral” (37). Case makes his living as an information cowboy, able to jack in to the matrix, to fix his addiction to cyberspace/access/information. In this way, the mind/body separation is encoded via technologies of the body, and it’s furthered by the structure of the novel: whenever Case jacks in to the matrix, Gibson begins a new paragraph, highlighting the separation between the body and the mind/matrix. Case doesn’t seem to have a body unless he is inside Molly, either in sex or in sim/stim. In the first case, Case’s visual description recalls images of the matrix and, in the second, he perceives Molly’s bodily sensations electronically. Molly is the body. Case can jack out at any time.

Molly gets into cyberspace, too, but only so that her body can be programmed during “puppet time.” Freud’s dictum that “there is no ‘No’ in the unconscious” is literally true for Molly in this situation. She paid for the reconstructive surgeries by working as a “meat puppet,” a high-tech form of prostitution in which a receptor chip is implanted in a woman’s brain. The chip provides reception for the “house software,” chosen by the customer. So what happens when Molly is with a customer? Her cyberspace is blank and her access to the matrix doesn’t disconnect her body from other bodies (witness Case). The programs used on Molly were progressively violent after the house found out she was using the money she made to become a ninja, to construct a body capable of being a killing machine. The function of the software to direct Molly’s actions mimics, terrifyingly, Freud’s version of the unconscious:

You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? . . . once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for . . . . [t]hen it started getting strange . . . . The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time . . . so the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain....you can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space.(148-9)

When Molly comes up out of puppet time, her reaction to the scene for which she had been programmed is violent opposition. Although her ability to react to the scene is an accident of faulty wiring, it’s a direct refutation of the programming, the unconscious, and the technical separation of mind and body:

I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all. Dead. So I guess I gave the Senator what he wanted...the house put a contract on me and I had to hide for a little while.(148-149)

Freud could have learned a few lessons from Molly about whether the conscious mind can say “No” to the unconscious drives. It is, however, an after-the-fact refusal; when Molly is unconscious (to a degree Freud could never have imagined), she seems totally incapable of resisting; it is the dysfunction of high technology that allows Molly’s “No.” The circle has been completed with techobodies, however: the access to the mind via science is complete, the comfortable line between human and machine has been erased, and the human therapist is no longer needed to interpret the signals. It’s a direct line.

The Freudian therapeutic paradigm can be mapped onto our relationship with (and struggle over) technologies of the body. The array of technologies used to construct bodies in Neuromancer seem fantastical, even technically impossible, yet the rush to develop technologies with which we can construct our bodies will provide funding and justification for their development, regardless of the health risks involved. At a recent Senate hearing over the safety of silicon breast implants (which have been known to break down once inside the body and produce disabling disease of the immune system), it was presumed that, despite these proven health risks, implants should be available for “cosmetic” uses. However, after testimony from “scores of women” who testified to their need “because of what they said they believed were their own deformities,” many panel members said they were “convinced that no line could be drawn and no group of women could be defined for exclusion” (Hilts). The cultural question of why “some women [are] terrified of not having the option to reconstruct their breasts” was never raised.

The solution to the problem posed presented to the F.D.A.? Surveillance. It was agreed that every woman who had undergone or wished to have this operation be “kept track of” in a database, set up by the companies which manufacture the implants. One can’t help but wonder if these records, and the access to them, might be used later to deprive the women of the protection allegedly promised to them–perhaps in manufacturing a “safe” reading of the implants or, alternatively, to prevent these women from taking action (legal or otherwise) against the companies.

The FDA case is simply one example of the need for some sort of resistance to this future. The case has some disturbing implications for Rosenthal’s declaration that “the matrix is too complex and fragmented to offer itself to any one unifying gaze–a notion that does not seem entirely reassuring to me” (95). This sentiment is problematic when we look back at Dora, whose unifying gaze had the opposite effect. Reiff acknowledges that Freud “had to admire Dora’s insight into this intricate and sad affair…Yet he fought back with his own intricate insights into the tangle of her motives…. Freud was to call this tenacious and most promising of all forms of resistance ‘intellectual opposition’” (17). Compare this statement with the following description: “Knowledge . . . is utterly immanent and implicated in the forms and technologies of instrumental power, and readable only to the extent that we have the power to decode it. How we are known and what we know constitute a matrix of unjustly distributed power . . .” (99).

This is Rosenthal, reading the matrix, yet it’s an uncanny characterization of the power dynamic that exists between Dora and Freud. But what about the present? In the wake of a reevaluation and, oftentimes, refutation of Freudian theory, wasn’t Freud’s clinical method also revised? Not completely; this clinical process is still used to manufacture belief and consent. In the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine (January/February 1993), Ethan Watters reports on psychotherapists who help their patients recover memories of physical and sexual abuse. The search for these memories, in theory, seems auspicious at a time when there is growing evidence that “childhood abuse is widespread” and underreported. Working against Freud’s seduction theory, based on the assumption that patients’ memories of abuse were fantasy (29), some therapists have taken the opposite tack, bringing past abuse to light by examining their patients’ subconscious memories. In theory, this hopeful disruption of Freud’s seduction theory promises to validate and treat the pain of childhood abuse.

This theoretical promise can be destroyed within a clinical method that recalls Freud’s relationship with Dora. Using hypnosis, suggestion, trance writing, and dream analysis, therapists “search [the patient’s] subconscious” for signs of abuse (26). Watters found that many of these memories were false, but are made real for the patient. The case of Kathy Gondolf reveals the process by which her beliefs were used against her to construct the version of her past held by the therapist. When Gondolf sought help for chronic bulimia, she told her therapist that she had been abused by an uncle during childhood. Watters reports that “[l]ater, during individual and group therapy, [the therapist] used dream analysis and trance writing to search her unconscious for signs that other members of the family had abused her as well” (26). Gondolf’s account of this therapy is a poignant reminder of the power dynamic in the relationship between therapist and patient:

You're sitting there and someone has taken everything you thought you know about your family--the people you love--and twisted it. They tell you that everything you knew for twenty, thirty, forty years was wrong.... It was devastating for me. Everything is so simple in the world of repressed memories, . . . if you claim that your parents cared for you, then they [psychotherapists] say that you are in denial. Anything you say can be misinterpreted. There is no way around it. This is costing people their lives.(26)

The women in her therapy group all claimed to have repressed memories of abuse as children, and one woman killed herself after “discovering” these memories. Gondolf, like Molly in Neuromancer, was released from this regimen when the supporting apparatus malfunctioned: her insurance ran out. Gondolf began to “examine repressed memories on her own” and, like Schreber, found treatment in being her own interpreter. She “became convinced” that “her therapist had coerced her and the other members of her group into imagining memories of abuse” (26). Forced out of the system, Gondolf relied on her own conscious memories to construct the truth of her history.

Is it possible to be “forced out” of the relationship between bodies and technologies? We cannot choose to end this relationship, as Dora chose to end her relationship with Freud. Nor can we escape the deluge of electronic texts. If any resistance to the “gradual accommodation of the machine” is possible, it will depend upon our reaction to the machine, and a continual realization that the machine is a human creation, a social creation. In late twentieth-century capitalism, has anything else assumed the role of therapist for us? In the struggle over representation, the media is given the power of interpretation; just as anything that is “conscious” knowledge (articulated by the patient) could not, by definition, belong to the “unconscious,” we are re-enacting the role of interpreter of reality with media. In doing so, we lend strength to the role of media by centering resistance within that arena.

In resisting hegemony via the struggle for representation, we may re-enact the binary opposition of representer/represented (and, on the same axis, therapist/patient); this resistance focuses on and strengthens the textual/media arena in which our actions are interpreted and represented. The exclusivity and limitations of television have been disrupted in the strategies of ACT-UP. The organization has found a way to use televised media without having financial access to them (staging protests during broadcasts as audience members, for instance).

We need to reconsider the issues of media(s) and representations with respect to the ways we define ourselves. Technology, having been taken into the body and reproduced (the male gaze being but one example), poses some immediate challenges. Neuromancer is the circle completed: technologies of the body connect the flesh to the computer. The issues raised here with respect to the post-natural future, and the questions of resistance, are urgent. Remembering the patterns of discipline and resistance, and the space to which the other has been assigned, might be a first step in helping us to describe and resist the “slow apocalypse” of technology (Rosenthal, 96).

It’s not simply that the body must claim its resistance against the machine; when recuperation is instantaneous one can resist only though finding new ways of resistance that don’t operate through negation, or marginalization. Resistance that succeeds is a testament to the interpretive power of individuals to make sense of their lives. I hope to have presented some warnings and historical precedents that may help one actualize and resist power in a time when our ability to do so is matched against and challenged by our encounter with technology.

Note

1. I have chosen to cite from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books: New York, 1984), because selections from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [translated by Alan Sheridan, Panthon Books (Random House) 1977] are brilliantly excerpted in the section titled “Discipline and Sciences of the Individual” (pp. 169-239). The excerpts describe many of the terms and issues used in my paper, particularly the formulation of the term “discipline” and the uses of “the examination” to further surveillance and power.

Works Cited
- Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.
- Chabot, Barry C. Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory and The Critical Act. Amherst: U Mass Press, 1982.
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books (Random House), 1977.
- Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Introduction by Philip Reiff. Collier Books, New York: <1963.
- —. “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Volume XII:9. London: Hogarth, 1958-1974.
- Gibson, William, Neuromancer. Ace: New York: 1984.
- Goldstein, Jan. “The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations, v. 34 (Spring 1991): 134-166.
- Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.
- Hilts, Philip, “F.D.A. Panel Cites Need to Keep Breast Implants.” The New York Times, November 15th, 1991, p. A8.
- Jameson, Fredric. “Nostalgia for the Present.” The South Atlantic Quarterly v. 88, no. 2 (1989): 521-32.
- Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
- —. “Femininity, Narrative, and Psychoanalysis.” Women, The Longest Revolution. Virago Press, Ltd., 1982.
- Rabinow, Paul, Ed. The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books: New York, 1984.
- Rosenthal, Pam. “Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberspace, and Cyberpunk.” Socialist Review (Spring 1991): 87-103.
- Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. London: Dawson, 1955.
September 25, 2013
The Four Luxembourgs Civitas Peregrina (From the diary of a traveler Pseudo-Vladislav Todorov)

Vladislav Todorov

Department of Slavic Languages
University of Pennsylvania
vtodorov@sas.upenn.edu

The explorers of Luxembourg usually designate its four stages according to the four possible etymologies of its name. The first three: the Luminous one, the Dissipated one, and the Twisted one stem from the Latin: Lux, Luxuriosus, Luxus. The fourth is usually derived from the name of the legendary revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg. The present exploration shall adhere to these interpretations of the name thus established through tradition.

I. The Luminous City of Luxembourg

Some travelers also refer to it as the City of the Sun. This city encloses an enormous hill. Seen from afar its architecture resembles a gigantic mesh that has caught and subdued the upheaval of the mighty masses of earth which had inflated with gas and lava the earth’s crust and left behind the mountains as monuments of their provocative erections towards the sun. The city is segmented into seven circles or rings that grip the hill in concentric circles towards the top. It resembles a formidable crinoline that repulses any rascal who might crawl up the hill. A grandiose temple is erected at that very top. To be precise the temple itself is the top. It springs up into an extraordinarily large dome on the top of which rises another smaller dome in whose center gapes an orifice that looks straight on the middle of the temple where the altar is placed. The dome is painted inside with the map of the celestial constellations, as if the sky repeats itself only lower down and smaller than itself. It has stooped down to the temple like a mystical constellation, a cipher that locks the meaning of the earthly events. The orifice is the threshold at which the maximal cosmic space is turned over into the minimal symbolic space of the temple. It is precisely through this orifice that the cosmos discharges its own superfluity for it to descend as the sacred order of the temple. Thus, the temple resembles a Cyclops’s skull turned towards the sun which has scorched his eye in order to illumine him from inside. In this sense the illuminated-the internally luminous city is blind. Thus built the temple manifests through its figure the original sin of man towards the sun. Because before he stood on two legs, before his forehead bulged out like a church dome, before his eyes turned radiant, before he became sunlike man was turning up towards the sky and its luminaries, his scarlet and cracked like an enormous sore ape’s ass. It is precisely this original anal openness of man towards the sun that some travelers saw manifested in the architecture of the shrines. The radiant–the seeing eye, the organ of light that bathes in rays will always drag after itself like a tin can the embarrassment of being once an anus. Thus the central aperture of the temple, respectively the city expresses the ambivalent openness of the citizens towards their ruler–the Sun. Anyone entering the temple seems to cave in an ass through whose anus the Sun down-casts its stern and all-pervasive gaze. It is the source of the total illumination of the city. In general, the whole city is arranged in such a way that it culminates spatially in the aperture. Thus the whole city bathes its guilt in light. That is an all-encompassing luminescence in which you cannot help but wallow. This is the city of the total vertical transparency emanated by its center (the aperture). An all-pervasive solar gaze descends downwards as a guillotine. Man who stares against this gaze glows completely illumined from inside. Man stops casting a shadow. The city corpus is in fact the terrestrial figure of this super-terrestrial gaze. The very body and structure of the city are the terrestrial incorporation of the downward gaze of a super-power. The city itself represents the total exteriorization and exhibition of life before this gaze. The descending transparency of the world manifests the epiphany of the Eye of the supreme supervisor–the Sun. Any kind of opaque negativity is usurped by the center. It is located there beyond and above the aperture of the city. Inside and below the aperture all is positive-transparent. The people are neighbors for they are totally illumined and all-pervaded by the self-same luminous substance. They bathe in this totality and thus they prosper. Completely transparent and weightless they seem to lack bodies with tunnels flatulent with heavy slops. This is the city of the completely erect and utterly projected outwards and upwards man who baths in the descending divine gaze. The emblem of the city is the Obelisk. Its erecting corpus is the spiritual gaze enacted in the matter of the world. The Eye-Sun as phallus.

II. The Dissipated City of Luxembourg

This city rises not completely built and not completely demolished. A grand bust happened and the crowd bustles around the city somewhat rowdy, somewhat corrupted, somewhat raped, somewhat exhausted, promiscuously fornicating, having once transformed plummets into maces. The demolished city gapes like a cold volcano resounding from time to time with damnation. Once the people had grown defiant and started erecting a Tower City in order to reach God. They tried to look upwards and see God. They wanted to erect the vertical (upwards) transparency of the world. It was an attempt to establish surveillance over God. To catch God on the spot. So God got furious and segmented, that is, demolished their language. He dismantled it into a multitude of mutually impenetrable languages. A total incongruity set in that demolished the corpus of the city. The demolished Tower City stands for the demolished human look advancing upwards to make transparent the world space. The fragmentation of language manifested an opaqueness that descended from above. This figured the absence of God, i.e. the absence of a center in the space of the City that could fully absorb all negativity in itself and thus make the people neighbors. God abandoned the Babel. The God-forsaken city developed an exclusively horizontal vision and strategy. The neighbor turned stranger. The space between people hollowed out. When God desolated the city He, so to speak distributed the negativity among the citizens. He turned everyone into something partial, strange, alien, something “other” than everyone else, into a capsulated particularity. The only possible interest became the horizontal interest between the incompatible particularities. Everyone lusted after power, strove to achieve self-made and self-fashioned Deiformity. The space of the city became a space of internecine strife. Thus the negativity discarded by God burst forth and desolation occurred.

Each desired the other in order to possess and abuse him, to subdue and mastered him. The space between thee and me was reduced. The city life demonstrates the desolation as a common condition. The corpus of the city that had started threatening erection towards God was castrated and went limp as a gut–the cesspit. God forced man to bend over. He twisted his bold gaze downwards. Thus God reinstated man’s guilty position. Bent over in guilt man met the eyes of his fellowman and desired him. He desired his neighbor. The Cross became the emblem of the castrated city corpus. The broken up obelisk.

III. The Twisted City of Luxembourg

Before they lived in their city, the people were engulfed in the intestines of a Bull. The Bull was God. And then one day the Hero appeared and led them out by killing the Bull-God. Before this happened, the world was split in two chambers, into physical and allegorical space. The allegorical space was the Labyrinth, whose tunnels always led towards the mouth of the Bull. The physical space was the Bull himself. The Labyrinth allegorically represented and exhibited the Bull’s intestines. The mouth of the Bull was the aperture which connected the two spaces. Exactly there “the one” began and ended in “the other”.

The mouth was the threshold. The world was set up as a two-chambered device engulfing the people from one space into the other. The allegorical space (the Labyrinth) continually collapsed into the physical one (the Bull’s mouth). This way the procession of Death was performed. The physical space was God himself. The allegorical one–His phony presence outside His own natura. In order to succeed the Hero had to walk back this same lethal path, to do an act opposite to the engulfing. It was precisely for this reason that the Hero did not appear among the living ones in the allegorical space in front of the mouth of the Bull-God. He appeared in the rear of the physical space or at the aperture opposite to the mouth–the anus of the Bull-God.

From there he entered the physique of the intestines and led out the people engulfed there back to the mouth. He led them out. Thus the Hero liquidated the Bull-God. He abolished the physique of the God and as a consequence of this he found himself together with his people in the allegorical space of the Labyrinth which survived as the One space. This turned out to be the virtual City of their liberation. The liquidation of God reduced the world to the omnipresence of the allegorical space. Nothing could exist beyond it. The tunnels of the figurative reality did not lead to any apertures. They were blind. The liquidation of God came as a radical denaturalization of existence. The Labyrinth is by itself a twisted construction. The corpus of the Labyrinth City does not resemble any bold exalted erection. It can never be straight, nor can it be broken. Its natural joints are twisted so that it cannot stand up. It drags its spreading horizontality. The transparency is reduced to the direct visibility in the convolutions of the tunnel. The global allegorical space could be recognized in the fact that the Labyrinth is exactly the same in all its cells and can be surveyed without moving about. It is a self-duplicating sameness. The citizens live in one and the same allegory without being able to see each other because of the vertebral-like structure of the Labyrinth. The physical space was absolutely shredded up and so busted. The allegorical one opened unlimited and thus became omnipresent. There was no power able to justify this endless allegorical order. The Labyrinth has no center. Every place in it is absolutely identical to every other place. In each cell of it emerge exactly the same things as in every other one. There are no heroically privileged places. When the Hero led his people into the Labyrinth he himself disappeared. He took a place in it and became like everyone else. He acquired the anonymous existence of everyone else. The Labyrinth as an emblem signifies nothing but the torso of the world after God was wrested off it. Nothing is present to testify to the sense of life, nothing exists to justify the order of the world but it is total. The Absurd. It is conspicuous the final de-gradation of the phallus into a colon. The erection is supplanted by constipation.

IV. Luxembourg–the Phantom City

Comrade Luxembourg–this is a woman

–Platonov

Most travelers describe it like this: a gigantic corpus, slowly augmenting, because it inflates and at the same time blackens. Having reached the point of bursting, exactly when its crust is ripping frightfully, threatening to let out slops and gases, the corpus starts slowly to soften and lighten up until it turns into a pulp. It is a necrotized womb stuffed up by dead substances. A womb turning into a vampire. This is the city of the most incredible metamorphose, mutation and vicissitude.

This city is organized according to the grammar of an instructive language. In contrast to the Tower City, here the language has not been demolished, but nevertheless, no tower has been built, no “Common Home”. This language propagates and agitates people to perform the sublime act–to claw the earth in exaltation. It was necessary to dig harder and more cunningly in order to transform the earth interior into a “Common Home”. The main effort of the subjects was to dig out a colossal pit, a gigantic aperture–sanctuary, an organized subterranean eternal sun-trap.

The total language projected reality of the Phantom City. In the space of the City reverberated thunder like proclamations. The people became heralds of stunning proclamations, of verbal maltreatment because the proclaimed reality was a bruised piece.

Reality dispersed in panic chased away by its own proclamations.

Language was the virtual reality and all things real peek out of it as phantoms. The Last Judgment was proclaimed real in order for a phantom to be punished–the bourgeoisie. Communism was proclaimed real in order for the other phantom to be immortalized –the proletariat. It was realized by being proclaimed. Do you recollect the story of the madman, who believed he was a hen, so They fed him with raw corn. He did not stop being insane but he stopped pretending to be a hen, so that he wouldn’t have to gnash his teeth on the raw corncobs. Someone proclaimed himself God and proceeded to feed on soil. The sun was proclaimed to be the Universal proletarian. Language. In the language there was no center nor horizontal or vertical coordination. It performed twisted parables according to the rules of its grammar. Language was a radioactive instrument that caused monstrous mutations in the city. Uncanny, melancholic longing engulfs the souls of the citizens. A longing for reality. And only through longing could reality open itself in the minds. Through this longing did the unnamed reality rush into the phantom figure of the city. The longing became the aperture through which reality made known its own presence. One thing sustained the population and the militants of the City–the fact, that there had to be a super point of view, one might say a central herald of the proclamations, for whom, everything that happened was observable, manageable, and goal-oriented. There existed the certainty that the life of the City is performed before the gaze of one centralized Eye-Mind. A certainty, that one surveyor observes and supervises the correct going on of the grandiose ceremony called Proletarian Revolution. Otherwise to every glance from inside life passed as an arbitrary dispersal or merging of phantoms and names. The despair came with the suspicion that this super Eye-Mind is also a phantom. A high density phantom arbitrary authorized with a centralized ontological presence. The certainty that the transparency of the City descended from above was a sham. This “see-through-all” Eye was also proclaimed. Through renaming its realities the Phantom City assembled and disassembled itself like an animated toy puzzle before the amazed eyes of the greatest Dadaist of the world (proclaimed to be such in Zurich). Like a real hero this Dadaist succeeded in getting to the bottle and letting loose the genie of the most imbecile Hocus-pocus. And with an exalted babble it penetrated the City and proclaimed it. Another Dadaist of the same rank constructed a machine for executions with quite artistic and precise functions. Then he himself jumped into it and thus became the requisite matter for its function in order to demonstrate its exquisite perfection. At night, tired by the excessive work of the Hocus-pocuses, the citizens of the Phantom City sulked and listened to the lamp fuse sucking in the kerosene. And in order to stifle the rumbling of their empty stomachs, they nibbled the wall plaster. This city had no special emblem. It was emblem itself. For there existed no sign that could stand for it. Everything got proclaimed–interned into the Cit.

* * *

All travelers observe a strict tendency towards de-naturalization of Luxembourg during its four stages:–passing from a vertical into a horizontal symbolism and its vanishing into crooked parabolas;–an ever more irreversible dislocation of the natural joints and apertures of the city corpus;–presence, then absence, then abolishing and at the end turning into a vampire of the city center;–from emblem representing the essence of the city–to a city emblem of itself.

Usually the travelers evade the teleological interpretations, because they lead life unto a certain destination and in this sense to certain utopia or anti-utopia. Others speak of the cyclic recurrence of the herein described stages. Still others to whom we pertain are convinced of the principle of the back and forth momentum. According to this principle the City of the Sun and the Phantom City are respectively the upper and lower dead-point between which historically acts the piston of Luxembourg.

IMPLETA CERNE! IMPLENDA COLLIGE!

September 25, 2013
A Draft Essay on Russian and Western Postmodernism*

Mikhail Epstein

Department of Slavic Languages
Emory University

I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the Western one. The paper was presented at the MLA conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie Perloff’s and Barrett Watten’s papers now proposed for this discussion. Also, I will cite several passages from my recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for the purely “ideological,” “Eastern” version of postmodernism as opposed to Fredric Jameson’s influential theory which connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the “late capitalism” and therefore denies its possibility in non-Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological Language. Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies. Occasional Papers, # 243. Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991). What I am going to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in Russian criticism where the question of “post-modernism” became as focal as the concept of “socialist realism” was in the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier one). In particular, I would like to address you to the articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn “Post-modernism: new ancient culture” and Sergei Nosov “Literature and Play,” accompanied by editorial comments in Novyi Mir (Moscow), 1992, No.2. pp.225-239.

First of all, I want to discuss “the origins and the meaning of Russian postmodernism,” taking the idiom from the famous work of Nikolai Berdiaev The Origins and the Meaning of Russian Communism (Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma, Paris, 1955). Communist teachings came to Russia from Western Europe and seemed at first completely alien to this backward semi-Asiatic country; however Russia turned out to be the first nation to attempt to enact these teachings on a world-wide scale. Berdiaev has shown convincingly that communism was intimately linked to the entire spirit of Russian history long before Russia learned anything about Marxism.

The same paradox, in my view, relates to the problem of Russian postmodernism. A phenomenon which seemed to be purely Western, in the final analysis exposes its lasting affinity with some principal aspects of Russian national tradition.

Among the different definitions of postmodernism, I would single out as the most important the production of reality as a series of plausible copies, or what the French philosopher Baudrillard calls “simulation.” Other features of postmodernism such as the waning of comprehensive theoretical metanarratives or the abolishment of the oppositions between high and low, elitist and mass culture, seem derivative of this phenomenon of hyperreality. Models of reality replace reality itself which therefore becomes irrecoverable.

Indeed, the previous dominant trends in Western twentieth century culture such as avant-gardism and modernism were elitist in that they pitted themselves against the reality of mass society either because of an alienation from it (modernism) or because of an effort to transform it in a revolutionary way (avant-gardism). As for metanarratives such as Marxism and Freudianism, their main point was to unmask the illusions of consciousness (ideological perversions) in order to disclose the genuine reality of material production or libidinal energy.

Yet once the concept of reality ceases to operate, these metanarratives, which appealed to reality, and elitist arts, which opposed it, begin to wane.

The appeal to a reality principle evokes the phenomena of great Western science, philosophy, and technology and thus may be considered the cornerstone of all Western civilization. According to this principle, reality must be distinguished from all products of human imagination and there are practical means which permit the establishment of truth as a form of correspondence between cultural concepts and reality. Science, technology, and even the arts strove to break through different subjective illusions and mythological prejudices to the substance of reality by way of objective cognition, practical utilization, and realistic imitation respectively. The last great metanarratives of Western civilization, those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, are still penetrated by this obsession with capturing reality and they relentlessly attempt to demystify all illusory products of culture and ideology.

During the twentieth century, however, an unexpected twist transformed these highly realistic and even materialistic theories into their own opposites. While Marxism, Freudianism, and Nietzscheanism all appealed to reality as such, they also produced their own highly ideologized and aestheticized realities, and more sophisticated tools of political and psychological manipulation. Reality itself disappeared, yielding to the most refined and provocative theories of realities and, next, to the practical modes of the production of reality. Now in the late twentieth century, what is produced is objectivity itself, not merely separate objects.

There are different modes for the production of reality. One is a Soviet-style ideocracy that flourished precisely on the basis of Marxism, which claimed to denounce all ideologies as mystification. Another is an American- style psychosynthesis which includes the comprehensive system of mass media and advertising that flourished precisely on the basis of pragmatism and psychoanalysis, both of which claimed to denounce all illusions of consciousness.

In other words, what we now see as reality is nothing more than a system of secondary stimuli intended to produce a sense of reality, or what Baudrillard calls “simulation.” In spite of any seeming resemblances, simulation is the opposite of what was understood as imitation during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Imitation was an attempt to represent reality as such without any subjective distortions. Simulation is an attempt to substitute for reality those images which appear even more real than reality itself.

The production of reality seems rather new for Western civilization, but it was routinely accomplished in Russia throughout its history. Ideas always tended to substitute for reality, beginning perhaps from Prince Vladimir who in 988 adopted the idea of Christianity and implanted it in a vast country in which there was hardly a single Christian.

Peter the Great ordered Russia to educate itself and vigorously introduced newspapers, universities, academies. Therefore they appeared in artificial forms, incapable of concealing their deliberateness, the forced order of their origination. Even the first factory in Russia was built not out of some industrial need, but because Czar Anna decided to build a factory to match Western development. In essence, we are dealing with the simulative, or nominative, character of a civilization composed of plausible labels: this is a “newspaper,” this–an “academy,” this–a “constitution”; but all of this did not grow naturally from the national soil, but was implanted from above in the form of smoothly whittled twigs–perhaps they will take root and germinate. Too much came from the idea, the scheme, the conception, to which reality was subjugated.

In his book Russia in 1839, Marquis de Coustine expressed this simulative character of Russian civilization in a most insightful manner. “Russians have only names for everything, but nothing in reality. Russia is a country of facades. Read the labels – they have ‘society,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘literature,’ ‘art,’ ‘sciences’–but as a matter of fact, they don’t even have doctors. If you randomly call a Russian doctor from your neighborhood, you can consider yourself a corpse in advance.”¹ One can ascribe this negative reaction to a foreigner’s malevolence, but Aleksandr Herzen, for one, believed that Marquis de Coustine had written the most fascinating and intelligent book about Russia. This Frenchman had expressed most precisely the simulative character of an entire civilization, in which the plan, the preceding concept, is more real than the production brought forth by that plan.

This nominative civilization, composed completely of names,² discloses its nature in Russian postmodernist art, which shows us a label pulled off of emptiness. Conceptualism, the prevailing trend in contemporary Russian art, is a set of labels, a collections of facades lacking the three other sides.³

The most grandiose simulacrum that expressed the simulative nature of Russian civilization was, of course, Petersburg itself, erected on a “Finnish swamp.” “Petersburg is the most intentional (or imaginary–umyshlennyi ) and abstract city on earth,” wrote Dostoevsky in “The Notes from the Underground”: the reality of the city was composed entirely of fabrications, designs, ravings, and visions lifted up like a shadow above a rotten soil unfit for construction.

A shakiness was laid into the very foundation of the imperial capital, which subsequently became the cradle of three revolutions. The realization of its intentionality and “ideality,” simply not having found firm soil beneath itself, gave rise to one of the first, and most ingenious, literary simulacra–in Dostoevsky: “A hundred times, amidst this fog, I’ve been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: ‘And what, if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn’t this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn’t it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior Finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, I think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?’”(A Raw Youth, emboldening mine–M. E.).⁴

This vision could have just come off of the canvas of a conceptual artist, a postmodernist master such as Eric Bulatov, for example. Contemporary Russian conceptualism emerged not from the imitation of Western postmodernism, but rather from precisely that Petersburg rotten fog and Dostoevsky’s “importunate reverie.” Potemkin villages⁵ appears in Russia not simply as a political trick, but as the metaphysical exposure of the fraudulence of any culture or positive activity. It is an outward appearance of a type which almost does not conceal its deceptiveness, but also does not destroy its illusion in a purposeful way, like Hinduist Maya should be destroyed. Rather it is anxious to secure its preservation as an appearance, but in no way prepares to ground or fill it in. The intermediary stratum between “is” and “is not” is that edge along which the “enchanted pilgrimage” of the Russian spirit slides.

After the Bolshevik revolution, this simulative nature of reality became even more pronounced. All social and private life was subjugated to ideology, which became the only real force of historical development. Those signs of a new reality of which the Soviets were so proud in the thirties and fifties, beginning with Stalin’s massive hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River and ending with Khrushchev planting of corn and Brezhnev’s numerous autobiographies, were actually pure ideological simulations of reality. This artificial reality was intended to demonstrate the superiority of ideas over simple facts. Communist subbotniks⁶ in the Soviet Union were examples of hyperevents which simulated “the feast of labor” precisely in order to stimulate real labor.

In Baudrillard’s definition of this phenomenon of hyperreal: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory–PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA–it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable [written by Borges] today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.”⁷

Anyone who looks at a map of the former Soviet Union today will agree that such a huge country had to arise initially on the map before it could expand in reality. Today we can address this phrase “the desert of the real itself” directly to what has remained from the Soviet Union. This country is originally poor not with commodities, comfort, hard currency, but with reality itself. All shortcomings and deficiencies are only symbols of this fading reality; and symbols themselves comprise the sole reality that survives in this country.

To sum up: reality as such gradually disappears throughout Russian history. All reality of pagan Rus’ disappeared when Prince Vladimir ordered the introduction of Christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. Similarly, all reality of Moscow Rus’ vanished when Peter the Great ordered his citizens “to become civilized” and shave their beards. All reality of “tsarist” Russia dissolved when Lenin and Bolsheviks transformed it into a launching pad for a communist experiment. Finally, all Soviet reality collapsed in several years of Gorbachev’s rule yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. Probably, the ideas of capitalist market and free enterprise have now the best chance in Russia, though they remain there once again pure conceptions against the background of hungry and devastated society. Personally I believe that in a long run Eltsin or somebody else will manage to create a sumulacrum of a market for Russia. Realities were produced in Russia out of the ruling elite’s minds, but once produced they were imposed with such force and determination that these ideological constructions became hyperrealities. * * *

Almost all investigators of postmodernism cite America as a wonderland in which fantasies become more real than reality itself. In this sense, however, America is not alone. Russia, as distinct from Europe, also developed as a realized dream. It is true that the postmodernist self- awareness of Soviet reality emerged later than parallel philosophical developments in the West. Nevertheless, already in the mid-seventies, so-called conceptual art and literature became more and more popular in the Soviet Union, suggesting a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire phenomenon of Soviet civilization. As distinct from realistic literature of the Solzhenitsyn type, conceptualism does not attempt to denounce the lie of Soviet ideology (from false ideas to a genuine reality). As distinct from metaphysical poetry of the Brodsky type, it does not turn away from Soviet reality in search of higher and purer worlds (from false reality to genuine ideas). Conceptual painting and writing, as presented by Ilya Kabakov, Erick Bulatov, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, convey ideas as the only true substance of the Soviet lifestyle. Paradoxically, false ideas comprise the essence of genuine reality.

The erasure of metanarrative is another important feature of postmodernism that is worthy of explanation. In the Soviet case, it is an indisputably Marxist metanarrative. There is a common, though fallacious, belief that only under and after perestroika, have Marxist teachings begun to dissolve into a variety of ideological positions. In truth, this dissolution began at the very moment when Marxism was brought to Russia and further progressed when it turned into Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Marxism.

Perhaps more than other metanarratives, Marxism relies on reality and materiality as the determinant of all ideological phenomena. When this teaching came to a culture in which reality had always been a function of powerful State imagination, a strange combination emerged: materialism as a form and tool of ideology. Paradoxically, Marxism was a catalyst for this transformation of Russia into one great Disneyland, though one less amusing than terrifying. Before the Bolshevik revolution, not all aspects of material life were simulated and some place remained for genuine economic enterprises. But now that Russian ideology has assimilated materialism, all material life has become a product of ideology.

Marxist teachings themselves also suffered a paradoxical transformation. On the one hand, Marxism became the only theoretical viewpoint that was officially allowed by the Soviet regime. For this very reason, it ironically grew to include all other possible viewpoints. Internationalists and patriots, liberals and conservatives, existentialists and structuralists, technocrats and ecologists all pretended to be genuine Marxists, pragmatically adapting the “proven teaching” to changing circumstances. In the West, Marxism preserved its identity as a metanarrative, giving its own specific interpretation of all historical phenomena because it was freely challenged by other metanarratives (such as Christianity and Freudianism). In the Soviet Union, however, Marxism became what postmodernists call pastiche, an eclectic mixture of all possible interpretations and outlooks. As an all- encompassing doctrine penetrating into physics and theater, military affairs and children’s play, Soviet Marxism was the ultimate achievement of postmodernism.

In Western society, postmodernism is often regarded as a continuation of the logic of “late capitalism,” a condition in which all ideas and styles acquire the form of commodities and become “manageable” and “changeable.” In the Soviet Union, postmodern relativity of ideas arises from its own ideological, not economic, base. All those concepts previously alien to the essence of communist ideology, such as “private property” and the “free market,” are now freely entering this ideological space, stretching it beyond its limits–allowing the ideology to embrace its own opposite. This is a process of de-ideologization, but not in the sense of Daniel Bell’s understanding of the phenomenon in his famous book, The End of Ideology. In the Soviet Union, de-ideologization means the end of the “particular” ideology which originally had a definite class character, social ideals, and aimed to inspire the proletariat to launch a socialist revolution and construct communism. The current de-ideologization of Marxism in the USSR is a process of the universalization of ideological thinking as such, its final move from the realm of militant modernism to a more playful, relaxed, postmodern mentality.

This de-ideologization, or super-ideologization, of Soviet Marxism raises a vital question: are there two distinct postmodernisms, one Western and one Eastern, or is there a single, shared postmodernism? The best answer, in the author’s view, is that “one-and-a-half” postmodernisms exist. The postmodern condition is essentially the same in the East and West, although it proceeds from opposite foundations: ideology and economics, respectively. Late capitalism and late communism are polar opposites in terms of economic structure and efficiency, but economics alone does not determine culture as a whole. The fundamental underlying patterns of cultural postmodernism in the East are not economic, they are ideological. Communism has proved to be a more radical challenge to capitalism than was originally thought, not only did it change the mode of production, it changed the relationship of base and superstructure in society.⁸

A comparison of capitalist economics and communist ideology is imperative for elucidating the postmodernist traits common to both societies. Such a “cross” examination would be more interesting than a parallel comparison; if one compares communist and bourgeois ideologies, or socialist and capitalist economics, little can be found beyond commonplace oppositions. It is far more relevant–even from a Marxist-Leninist perspective–to examine the common ground between communist ideology and capitalist economics, as the two perform identical functional roles in their respective social structures. The circulation of goods in capitalist society is essentially identical to the circulation of ideas in communist society. Ideology, like capital, allows for the growth of surplus value, or, in this case, surplus evaluation. In a communist society, every concrete fact of the “material” world is treated ideologically, as evidence of some general historic tendency–its significance increases from one instance of ideological interpretation to the next.

The famous formula of a capitalist economy which Marx suggested in Das Kapital is “commodities–money–commodities,” or “money–commodities–money.” The same formula can be applied in modified form to the ideology of Soviet Marxism: “reality – idea – reality,” or “idea – reality – idea.” Facts are exchanged for ideas in communist society in the same way as goods are exchanged for money in capitalist societies. Ideas, as a sort of currency, acquire an abstract form of “ideological capital.” They do not constitute material wealth, but the “correctness” of communist ideology. This “correctness,” or absolute truth, compensates people for their labor (“heroic deeds and sacrifices”), as well as recoups the cost of so-called “particular” mistakes resulting from Party policy.

What happens in the late stage of communist development? Why does it move toward a “postmodernist condition” along the same path followed by “late capitalist” societies? Totalitarianism was a superlative machine for accumulating and exploiting all sorts of ideas: leftist and rightist, revolutionary and conservative, internationalist and patriotic, etc.. However, this machine spawned a phenomenon bigger than itself. Just as capital eventually outgrows the capitalist “machine” and becomes a self- sufficient entity, Soviet ideological capital has outgrown the “machine” of a particular personality or system of ideas and has become an omnipresent mentality, appropriating any fact to serve any idea. Such is the current state of Soviet society under glasnost’. Marxist ideology, the most powerful of all modern ideologies, is losing its identity and becoming only one possible interpretation of reality (in the Soviet Union, it would be the least probable one!). The expansion of Marxist ideology overcame Marxism as a form of modernity and created the postmodern condition in the USSR.

The overarching expansion of Soviet ideology occurred in the Brezhnev era, when the difference between facts and ideas was practically erased. Ideology was gradually transformed from a system of ideas into an all-encompassing ideological environment which retained all possible alternative philosophical systems as latent components within itself. Existentialism and structuralism, Russophilism and Westernism, technocratic and ecological movements, Christian and neo-pagan outlooks–everything was compressed into the form of Marxism, creating a sort of post-modernist pastiche.

One can easily anticipate a counter-argument: how can we refer to Soviet postmodernism without a clear identification of Soviet modernism? Western postmodernism came after modernism, so where is the corresponding progression in Soviet culture?

It is obvious, however, that Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period was predominantly modernist as such trends as symbolism and futurism indicate. As expressions of a highly utopian vision, the Bolshevik movement and October revolution also can be seen as modernist phenomena. The same rigidly consistent style of modernist aesthetics was dominant in the twenties as Mayakovsky’s and Pilnyak’s works demonstrate.

In this sense, socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction of all possible stylistic devices including Romantic, Realist, and Classicist models. Andrei Siniavsky’s dissident interpretation (in a 1960 famous essay “On Socialist Realism”) of Soviet official literature as of a reborn classicism was one-sided, as were more conformist attempts to describe socialist realism in terms of amplified critical realism, or heroic romanticism, or combination of both. Socialist realism was not a specific artistic direction in a traditional or modernist sense, it can be adequately approached only as a postmodernist phenomenon, as an eclectic mixture of all previous classical styles, as an encyclopedia of literary cliches. We should trust more to social realism’s own self-definition: the unity of a method attained through the diversity of styles (or their mixture, or pastiche). “Socialist realism is regarded as a new type of artistic consciousness which is not limited by the framework of one or even of several modes of representation….”⁹ Socialist realism simulated successfully all literary styles beginning from ancient epic songs and ending with Tolstoy’s refined psychologism and futuristic poetics of a placard and a slogan.

The epoch of the thirties through fifties in the Soviet Union was clearly post*modernist, even though the prevailing term at the time was “anti*modernism.” The furious struggle against “rotten bourgeois modernism” became the hall-mark of Stalinist aesthetics. What was antimodernism in relation to the West was postmodernism in relation to the native, pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary modernist culture.

In the sixties and seventies, another wave of modernism came into Soviet literature: futurist, surrealist, abstractionist and expressionist trends were revived in literature, painting, and music. The twenties became the nostalgic model for this neo-modernism of the sixties as presented in Andrei Voznesensky and Vasily Aksyonov.

This explains why later, in the seventies and eighties, another wave of postmodernism arose in opposition to this sixties “neo-modernist” generation. For such postmodernists as Ilya Kabakov, Boris Grois, or Dmitri Prigov there are no figures more adversarial, than Malevich, Khlebnikov, and other modernists of the early 20th century, not speaking about the latter’s successors in the sixties such as Andrei Voznesensky or Vassily Aksyonov. Consequently, this postmodern generation feels a sort of nostalgia precisely for the typical Soviet lifestyle and the art of social realism which provides them with congenial ideological material for their conceptual works. Social realism is close to conceptualism in its antimodernist stance: they share highly conventional semiotic devices, the sets of cliches and idioms that are devoid of any personal emphasis and intentional self-expression.

These components of the postmodernist paradigm, which in the West were introduced simultaneously, took much longer to mature in Soviet culture. The erasing of the semantic difference between idea and reality, between the signifying and the signified, had been achieved by the first Soviet postmodernism (socialist realism); while the syntactic interplay of these signs was aesthetically adopted only by the second postmodernism (conceptualism). Although it would seem that these two processes must coincide, it took several decades for Soviet culture to pass from one stage to another.

The point is that Western culture has great respect for reality that is beyond signs. As soon as signs proved to be self-sufficient, they immediately acquired a playful dimension. The Russian cultural tradition is much more inclined to view signs as an independent reality deserving of the greatest esteem. Therefore it was extremely difficult to accept that these signs which substitute for reality may become objects of irony and aesthetic play.

Western postmodernism includes two aspects: what can be called the substance of postmodernism, and the interpretation of this substance in postmodernist conceptual framework. In the Soviet Union, these two aspects developed separately. The period from the thirties to the fifties witnessed the emergence of postmodernism as a specific substance, including the ideological and semiotic dissolution of reality, the merging of elitist and mass culture into mediocrity, and the elimination of modernist stylistic purity and refinement. Only in the late fifties, in the works of such poets as Kholin, Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Vilen Barsky, and then in the seventies, in the works of Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, and Lev Rubinstein, was the “substantial” postmodernism of Soviet culture interpreted precisely in postmodernist terms. Signs of heroic labor, collectivism, the striving for a communist future, and so on which previously were perceived seriously as the signified reality itself, now were perceived only at the level of signs themselves, which are susceptible to all sorts of linguistic games. In the 1980s Soviet postmodernism finally overtook its second aspect and bloomed into a full cultural phenomenon comparable with its Western parallel.

Certainly, such postmodernist phenomena as Borges’s stories, Nabokov’s and Umberto Eco’s novels or Derrida’s models of deconstruction have had a considerable influence on some contemporary schools of Soviet writing, including conceptualism and metarealism. What is much more striking, however, is that the earlier Soviet post- or antimodernism still influences, though unconsciously, the contemporary American literary scene. For example, Tom Wolfe’s recent manifesto “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”¹⁰ gained much attention with his attacks against modernism and his calls for a social novel which would combine fiction and reporting. Wolfe involuntarily duplicates the very patterns that Stalin’s ideologists used in their relentless political tirades against Russian pre-revolutionary and Western bourgeois modernism. Wolfe probably has never heard of Zhdanov’s infamous 1946 report debasing Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, let alone read it. Nevertheless, Wolfe’s main points and even his choice of metaphors are the same as Zhdanov’s: they both compare writing to engineering, for example. Wolfe also proposes that writers form brigades to pool their talents for an investigation of the amazing social reality in the United States, as it was in the Soviet Union of 1930’s.¹¹

I do not go so far as to suggest that the aesthetic code of Stalinism directly influenced such an “antimodernist” writer as Tom Wolfe. Yet the terms of postmodernist debate apply equally well in such embarrassingly different conditions as the U.S.S.R. in the late forties and the U.S. in the late eighties. The striving for a postmodernist world view inevitably brings about an opposition to the abstractness and individualism of modernist writing; it also causes a turn towards common and stereotyped forms of language as imposed by the dominant social order.

In a broader perspective, postmodernism can be seen as a type of culture which was developed in both the West and the Soviet Union, although by different methods. The Western version of postmodernism came chronologically later, though it was much more theoretically self-conscious. To try to isolate and identify a Western-style postmodernism in twentieth century Russian culture proved to be a difficult problem because the formation of specifically Russian postmodernism had been divided into two periods.

The development of Russian modernism was artificially stopped in the thirties, while in the West it developed smoothly up to the sixties. This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, in the thirties and in the seventies. This obliges us to compare not only Russian postmodernism with its Western counterpart, but also to examine the two Russian postmodernisms: socialist realism and conceptualism. Perhaps, it is the chronological gap between them that made both versions so ideologically charged, though in two opposite directions. The first postmodernism is explicitly heroic, the second one is implicitly ironic. Nevertheless, if we identify them as two aspects and two periods of one historical phenomenon, these opposite tenets easily neutralize each other, comprising entirely “blank pastiche,” to use Fredric Jameson’s definition of postmodernism.

The tendency to perceive socialist realism and conceptualism as mutually s/t/imulating aspects of the same cultural paradigm presumably will get further support in the course of future reinterpretations of Soviet history in terms of its integrity and the interdependence of its “initial” and “conclusive” phases. Two Russian postmodernisms complement each other and present a more complicated and self-contradictory phenomenon than Western postmodernism which is concentrated in a single period of history.

* This draft essay was circulated during Postmodern Culture’s Symposium on Russian Postmodernism. See SYMPOS-1.193 to find where it was included in the discussion. Included here are Epstein’s comments introducing the essay. –Ed.

Notes

1. Marquis de Coustine, Nikolaevskaia Rossiia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo obshchestva politkatorzhan, 1930, p. 79.

2. Is it not this “nominativity,” this pure concern with names, that gives rise to the sinister power of the nomenklatura, that is those people selected by no one and by no means meriting their stature, but who are named “secretary,” “director,” or “instructor” and have received power by virtue of these names.

3. On contemporary Russian Conceptualism see Mikhail Epstein “After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1991, v.90, no.2, pp.409-444, and Mikhail Epstein, “Metamorphosis: On New Currents in the Soviet Poetry.” Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby. University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 382-407.

4. Dostoevsky has several variations on the theme of this vision, which affected him deeply, in A Weak Heart(1848), in Petersburg Dreams in Verse and in Prose(1861), and in the sketches for The Diary of a Writer(1873).

5. Dummy villages erected, according to foreigners, by the order of Prince Potemkin along the route he was to take with Catherine II after the annexation of the Crimea, 1783. This expression is used allusively of something done for show, an ostentatious display designed to disguise an unsatisfactory state of affairs, a pretence that all is well, etc. See Russian-English Dictionary of Winged Words, Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1988, p.162.

6. Voluntary unpaid work on days off, originally on Saturdays.

7. J. Baudrillard. The Precession of Simulacra. Semiotexte: New York, 1983, 2.

8. For a critical discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled “Basis and Superstructure: Reality and Ideology,” in Marcuse, Soviet Marxism, 106-107.

9. Literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. Moscow: Sovetskaiia entsiklopediia, 1987, p.416.

10. Tom Wolfe. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. A literary manifesto for the new social novel.” Harper’s November 1989.

11. These issues are discussed at length in my article “Tom Wolfe and Social(ist) Realism.” Common Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1992, v. 1, No. 2, pp. 147-160.

September 25, 2013
Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?

Marjorie Perloff

Stanford University
0004221898@mcimail.com

In the wake, first of perestroika, and now of the wholesale dissolution of the Soviet Union, the temptation has been great to align the “new Russian poetry” with its American postmodernist counterpart. And since the poets who have taken the most active role in translating this hitherto samizdat poetry are those associated with the Language movement, most notably Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, and Jean Day, as well as Hejinian’s collaborators (Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten) on the extraordinary travel book Leningrad (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), there is naturally a feeling on the part of the Russian poets themselves that there are serious links between the Russian and the American postmodernist avant-garde, whatever these much contested terms really mean. At a reading at New Langton Street last year, for example, when the question was put to Alexei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov, “What American poets have influenced your work?” the immediate reply, I believe from Parshchikov, was “the language poets.” The same point is made by Andrew Wachtel and Parshchikov in their Introduction to Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby’s new anthology The Third Wave. “For both groups,” they write, “the source of poetic production is found in language itself, and it is with this group that, for the first time, the former underground poets have entered into active poetic dialogue . . . in the last few years these contacts have increased as the Soviet poets are actively translating and being translated by their newfound American poetic soulmates.”¹

The new rapprochement between our two poetries has already made a difference, especially on this side of the globe. The influx of energy, enthusiasm, and daring, as well as a new range of source and thematic materials, surely stands behind such recent books as Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota, a long “novel in verse” on the model of Pushkin’s Evgeni Onegin and Clark Coolidge’s forthcoming Russian Nights. At the same time, the question remains, at least for me, whether the homologies between the two poetries are really as prominent as they are claimed to be. And a related question would be: given the enormous political, social, and cultural differences between our two countries over the past century, and given the long midcentury hiatus of the Stalinist years, which largely suppressed the “Modernism” to which recent developments are supposedly “post,” can we expect to find comparable poetic paradigms?

Take Dmitri Prigov’s discussion of Conceptualism in his manifesto “What more is there to say?” and Mikhail Epstein’s elaboration on it, both included in The Third Wave. The Conceptual Art movement in the U.S. dates from the late sixties; as Ursula Meyer explains it in the introduction to her handbook by that title: The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts . . . . An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. More specifically: the Conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth and Vito Acconci, of Hans Haacke and John Baldessari took up the challenge presented by Duchamp, “preferring the ideational over the visual” and rejecting the notion of a predominantly retinal art, where “meaning” is hidden by a set of visual signs. Art as idea, art as information or knowledge: in practice, this meant that the catalogue could become the exhibition, or indeed, that there would be no exhibition at all, only a series of writings and blueprints.

Now compare this aesthetic to Epstein’s account: What is conceptualism?. . . . Almost any artistic work . . . is conceptual insofar as there lies within it a certain conception, or the sum of conceptions, which the critic or interpreter draws out. In conceptualism this conception is demonstrably separable from the live artistic fabric and even becomes an independent creation, or “concept” in itself. . . . a “break between the idea and the thing, the sign and reality, is created.” And Epstein cites a passage from Dimitri Prigov: The outstanding hero– He goes forward without fear But your ordinary hero– He’s also almost without fear But first he waits to see: Maybe it’ll all blow over And if not– then on he goes And the people get it all. And he comments: Behind these lines by Dmitri Prigov we easily recognize the formula that lies at the basis of numerous pathetic works about the fearless, all-conquering hero and his slightly backward but devoted comrades in arms. The typical problem with such odic writings is how to reliably hide the formula behind the clothing of linguistic beauty so as to make it frighteningly similar to a live person. The poet-conceptualist, on the other contrary, drags the formula out into the open from the sum of its aesthetic imprintings and changes of form, placing it as an independent fact before the reader’s perception. . . . Conceptualism . . . unmask[s] beneath the covering of lyrical soulfulness or epic picturesqueness the skeleton of an idea-engendering construct. (TW 270) For Epstein–and his explanation accords with Prigov’s own as well as with Lev Rubinshtein’s statement of his “conceptualist” poetics in The Third Wave–conceptualism evidently refers to the willingness to reveal the ideological base which a more conventional poetry would try to mask beneath a set of decorative trappings. But ironically, this urge to “expose” the ideologeme and separate it from its material embodiment is almost the antithesis of the conceptualism of our sixties and seventies, which rejected the notion of hidden meaning outright, making the case that psychological depth was itself an anachronism. Whereas American conceptual art was an attack from the Left on the vapidity and “prettiness” of late Abstract Expressionism and color-field painting, the Soviet version is concerned to unmask the “aesthetic imprintings,” designed to make Socialist Realist poetry and painting more palatable. Conceptualism, in this sense, is more properly a form of parody or pastiche, a self-conscious mode of satire that takes nothing on faith and is determined to reveal precisely those inner motivations of poetic and artistic discourse that our own Conceptualists have denied existed.

The other two movements described by Epstein– Metarealism and Presentism–pose somewhat different problems for the Anglo-American reader. “Metarealism” (here Epstein includes such poets as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Nadezhda Kondakova, Viktor Krivulin, Olga Sedakova, and Ivan Zhdanov) is defined as “the pull toward the construction of supertemporal models of reality,” the emphasis being on metamorphosis, the process whereby “one thing becomes the other.” Metarealism, says Epstein “has little in common with surrealism, since it turns not toward the subconscious but to a supraconsciousness” (TW 177). To which Surrealists would respond that in practice, one can’t quite separate the two. Indeed, such precursors of surrealism as Rimbaud and Lautreamont made use of precisely the kind of imagery Epstein describes; the passionately erotic, discontinuous, and hallucinatory poetry of Dragomoshchenko, for that matter, immediately brings Rimbaud to mind although there are no doubt important Russian models as well.

The third major movement–presentism or the “poetry of presence”–is characterized by its “taste for contemporaneity and the technological plasticity of objects,” but without the “social-aesthetic aggressiveness and evangelical utopianism” of futurism (TW 280). “Presentism,” writes Epstein, “affirms the presence of an object, its visibility and tangibility, as the necessary and sufficient conditions of its meaningfulness.” And his gives the example of Parshchikov’s “Catfish,” as a phenomenological lyric that tries to capture “the sum total of perceptions: [the catfish] in water and on land, waking and sleeping” (TW 281).

I find this account somewhat puzzling because postmodernism is generally characterized as precisely the calling into question of presence, of center, of organic wholeness, and so on. From the late sixties, when Derrida published Ecriture et difference, “presence” has been one of those terms whose role is to be negated in favor of its antithesis, “absence.” How, then, do we deal with a poetry like Parshchikov’s? His own “Conversation between an Editor and a Poet,” reprinted in The Third Wave, doesn’t help us very much. Parshchikov says he “want[s] to be plugged into the search for a new descriptive language,” but then adds that “there is no ‘old’ language, only the discovery of new ways, only the growth of language.” And further: “Biochemistry is leading us into a world where the border between the living and the dead is washed away. . . . and so I wrote about the concrete work on earth” (TW 24).

Let us look more closely at the poetry itself. Here is “BEGSTVO–II,” (the original is represented here by my transliteration), together with Michael Palmer’s translation in The Third Wave, and the word-for-word translation of Parshchikov’s poem by Andrey Patrikeyev: (Peel. Peel i priboy. Myedlenuh, kak smyati pakyet tselofanovi shevelitsuh rasshiryayass zamootnyayetsuh pamyat. Samalyot iz peska snizhayetsuh, takovim nye yavlayayass Vnachalyeh voini mirov kroochye beryot poleen Vpoot’ sobirayass, ya chistil ot nassekomikh radyator, kogda novi ogon’ spalil puluvinu zemyel’, no nass nye nakreel, isskomikh Pepyel byenzozapravki. Peel i priboy. Kroogom nikovo, kromye zaglavshevoso pribora Vsadnik li zdyess myertsal, ili snybeo pyeskom possipali leeneeyu priboya Vrabye blestyat kablooki i zoobi. Tanyets Tyanyetso, slovno bredyen vkogtyakh cherepakhi. Zrya Ya eeshchoo tebya, soboy nye yavlyayass; nass, vozmozhno, rassassivayet zyemla) FLIGHT Michael Palmer Dust. Sea-form and dust. Slowly, the way a crushed cellophane packet stirs and expands, memory blurs. An airplane out of sand descends–not even a plane. At the start of the war of the worlds harsh wormwood takes command. Preparing to set out, I was scraping bugs from the radiator when a new fire torched half the land, seeking but missing us. Gas station’s ashes. Sea foam and dust. Nothing around but this control panel in eternal malfunction Was a rider shimmering there, or was sand scattered from the sky along the shoreline … Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar. The dance fans out like a seine net in a turtle’s claws. In vain I search for you, not knowing who I am Maybe the earth dissolves us. (TW 26) “Begstvo II”: Word-for-Word Translation Andrey Patrikeyev (Dust. Dust and the surf. Slowly like the moving crumpled plastic bag the memory expands, getting torrid. A plane made of sand is losing height, without being a plane. The smell of wormwood is more acute at the beginning of the war of the worlds. Getting ready to set off, I was cleaning the radiator from insects when a new fire burned half of the lands, without reaching us whom it sought. The ashes of the petrol station. Dust and surf. All around there is nobody but the instrument (measuring?) that is telling lies without reserve. Was it a rider that glimmered here or was it sand that was strewn over the line of the surf … Heels and teeth glitter in the bar. The dance is like a drag net stretching in the claws of a tortoise. In vain I’m seeking you without being myself; maybe we are being dissolved by the earth.)

Palmer’s fine translation, generally quite close to the original (compare it the word-for-word translation by Andrei Patrikeyev), presents us with nature images in collision with those of industrialization gone awry. In this nameless and faceless landscape of “sea-foam and dust” (peel i priboy), memory expands like “a crushed cellophane packet,” and the “gas station’s ashes” cover the sand, which scatters like a mysterious airplane or, in the second stanza, like a “rider shimmering there,” with “Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar.” Sea-foam, dust, wormwood, bugs, turtle’s claws: these items from the natural world provide a mysterious backdrop, first for the “radiator,” from which a “new fire” seems to erupt, “torch[ing] half the land, seeking but missing us,” and then in line 9, for the unnamed “instrument” or “measuring” agent–Palmer ominously calls it a “control panel in eternal malfunction.” The poem inevitably raises the specter of Chernobyl, although the meaning is not limited to that particular disaster, the imagery conjuring up any number of nightmare visions having to do with fire, earthquake, and apocalypse. Whatever the referent, the poet presents himself as one who can make contact neither with the unnamed “you” nor with himself: the only reality seems to be one of wholesale “dissolution” (rassassivayet zyemla).

Given its hallucinatory imagery, its lack of specification of “I” and “you,” its strange conjunctions of unlike objects–rider with flashing teeth and radiator covered with bugs–it seems quite appropriate to call a poem like “Flight” “meta-realistic” as well as “presentistic.” Yet the motive and mode of Parshchikov’s poem is, in many ways, quite different from, say, the poetry of his translator Michael Palmer. Here, for example, is the opening of Palmer’s “Notes for Echo Lake 1”: He says this red as dust, eyes a literal self among selves and picks the coffee up Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move. It was the woman beside him who remarked that he never looked anyone in the eye. (This by water’s edge.) This by water’s edge. And all of the song ‘divided into silences’, or ‘quartered in three silences’. Dear Charles, I began again and again to work, always with no confidence as Melville might explain. Might complain.²

Like “Flight” Palmer’s “Echo Lake” has references to dust, to water’s edge, and to the process of memory, but it is much more dislocated–or more strictly speaking, unlocated than Parshchikov’s “Flight.” In the latter, the scene, however dream-like, is a constant throughout, even as the positioning of the the poet’s “I,” however unspecified and generic, is clearly established. This specification is in keeping with the poem’s formal structure: four stanzas, each rhyming abab with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes. In Palmer’s poem, on the other hand–and this would be equally true for, say, John Ashbery or Lyn Hejinian or Barrett Watten–subjectivity splinters and scenes shift from moment to moment. “The grey wall . . . toward which you move,” for example, gives way to “It was the woman,” and a declarative sentence like “He never looked anyone in the eye,” is followed by the pronomial phrase, “This by water’s edge,” where “This” has no specific referent. Address too shifts, as we see in the “Dear Charles” passage. Formally, the poem is prose–a fragmentary, gnomic prose that alludes to “events” and “objects” we cannot define, even though “Notes for Echo Lake” is, broadly speaking, a lyric “about” the emptying out of the sign, the search for clues that might connect past to present, that might make sense of memory and desire.

To generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous, and my aim is by no means to set up some sort of neat presence/ absence dichotomy between our two poetries. But what may be helpful in drawing literary/cultural maps of the postmodern situation is to “thicken the plot,” as John Cage would put it, by finding the lacunae in the current narrative. One such link, whether overt or not, is French Modernist poetry, not so much the poetry of Dada or the full-blown Surrealism of Andre Breton or Robert Desnos, as the poesie brute (“raw poetry”) of Pierre Reverdy, Rene Char and other Modernist poets who came of age after World War I. Indeed, the poetry of Parshchikov, of Dragomoschenko, and other poets of the “Third Wave” seems much more analogous to the intense, elliptical, and mysterious lyric of a Reverdy than to the disillusioned, cool, media-reactive postmodernism of late twentieth-century America. Here, for example, is Reverdy’s “Chemin Tournant,” which I reproduce in Kenneth Rexroth’s translation: It is frightening grey dusty weather A south wind on strong wings Dull echoes of water in the capsizing evening And in the soaking night spouting turning Rough voices complaining A taste of ashes on the tongue The sound of an organ in tbe byways The pitching ship of the heart All the disasters of work When the fires of the desert go out one by one When the eyes drip like blades of grass When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves Morning hardly risen Somebody seeks A lost address on a lost road The stars brighten the flowers tumble down Across the broken branches The dark brook wipes its soft scarce parted lips When the steps of the walker on the counting dial order the movement and crowd the horizon All cries pass and all times meet And me I walk to heaven my eyes in the rays Noise about nothing and names in my head Living faces Everything that has happened in the world And this holiday Where I have lost my time³ John Ashbery, in an essay of the sixties, praised Reverdy’s poetry for its transparency, its presentation of factories and canals as “living phenomena,” its “restoration to things of their true name, without the eternal dead weight of symbolism and allegory.”⁴ The mysterious presence things assume in Reverdy’s poetry (“When the steps of the walker on the counting dial / order the movement and crowd the horizon”) is not unlike the mysterious presence, in the middle of Parshchikov’s “sea-foam and dust,” of a measuring “instrument” or “control panel” that has gone awry.

The issue is not, finally, whether Parshchikov knew Reverdy when he wrote his poem or whether the links between them are only coincidental. Rather, I want to suggest–and I made a similar point in the case of Arkadii Dragomoschenko in a recent issue of Sulfur⁵— that as literary and cultural historians, we should try to flesh in the picture, tracing lineages and cultural formations more accurately than we have done to date. Take the simple fact that Ashbery and Palmer, themselves important to Parshchikov, were great disseminators of the French “poetry of presence.” Such missing pieces in the coming into being of the postmodern puzzle will help us to define the momentum that has brought the Third Wave brilliantly crashing on our shore.

Notes

1. The Third Wave, The New Russian Poetry, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 9. Subsequently cited as TW.

2. Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 3.

3. Pierre Reverdy, “Turning Road,” Selected Poems, trans. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1969), 21.

4. John Ashbery, “Reverdy en Amerique,” Mercure de France: Pierre Reverdy Issue, 344 (January/April 1962): 111-12. I reproduce the whole passage and translate the key sentences in The Poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 35-37.

5. Sulfur 29 (Fall 1991): 216-21.

September 25, 2013

Symposium on Russian Postmodernism

Symposiasts:

Jerome McGann, Department of English, University of Virginia (jjm2f@lizzie.engl.Virginia.EDU)

Vitaly Chernetsky, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, St. Petersburg, Russia (atd@HM.SPB.SU)

Mikhail Epstein, Department of Slavic Languages, Emory University

Lyn Hejinian, (70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM)

Bob Perelman, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania (bperelme@SAS.UPENN.EDU)

Marjorie Perloff, Department of English, Stanford University (0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM)

[Editor’s note:

This symposium brought together several people working in the field of Russian Postmodernism. Discussions took place in the month of October 26-November 25, 1992.

The genre of this symposium is unusually mixed. You will find here, among other things, lengthy set pieces, conversational responses, poems previously published and unpublished, draft essays, papers from conferences, and excerpts from published work. Instead of a flow of short entries, we received fewer, longer messages.

We have chosen not to regularize the form of these entries or their mechanics, and not to revise or edit messages, in order to preserve the occassional nature of the discussion. You might refer the work found here to a transcription from an oral symposium, with printed text incorporated, and not to the dialogue of essays and replies often published in journals.]

 
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1992 11:09:14 -0500
From: "Jerome J. McGann" 
Subject: Re: well...no record

Perhaps it will be useful to begin the discussion with a set of
topics and questions that seem to me to be pertinent -- given
what various people involved have already said or written.
     Marjorie Perloff's draft essay on "Russian Postmodernism",
sent for this symposium, focusses a central problem: how does one
talk about the relations that have been made and pursued between
agroup of contemporary Russian writers and certain western
writers (are they a "group"? how?) who have been seen as their
counterparts?
     Let me say that the (local) history of the emergence of
each"group" -- both have constructed themselves outside given and
traditional institutions -- is a telling fact.  (Though of course
"samizdat" and "small press"/private printing/desktop publishing
ventures have in each culture, by now, been fairly
well-established.)
     The problem may be seen in various forms.  Perloff traces
out some differences in conceptualist programs and ideas.  In
_Leningrad_ the same problem appears, I think, in the recurrent
preoccupation with the question of the poetic "object", as well
as with the (perhaps related) question of the status of
"objects-as-such" in two very different types of societies.  (The
problem --perhaps it is reciprocal -- of the "subject" also
arises repeatedly.)
     For example: I read Perloff's essay and I wonder: why did
she write this? what is the point of pointing out such
differentials?  Or I read Watten's essay on "Post-Soviet
Subjectivity. . ." and wonder: is this essay "about"
Drogomoshenko and Kabakov and "post-soviet" writing, or is it
about -- somehow, for some reason --contemporary American
writing?
     I think it would be useful if everyone in the symposium
addressed these issues at the beginning.  You might want to
respond to Prigov or to Perloff or to Watten specifically, or to
pick up from any of the other related texts in _Leningrad_ or
_The Third Wave_ or _Poetics Journal_ no. 8.
     For myself, I would find it helpful if -- in addressing
these issues -- a person would also explain why they take their
chosen approach (e.g., through social and institutional history;
through questions of aesthetics, or stylistics; through a
consideration ofthe relation of poetry and ideology; or of
writing and language and "the person"; etc.).
     At some point the more general cultural and social question
also needs to be taken up.  How to frame the question is itself a
question?  Well, there are different imaginable ways: why has
this intercourse begun?  what function does it serve the
individuals, their societies, the practise of writing and art?
Most immediately, what are we doing in this very symposium, what
are we after?

Jerome McGann

 
Mon, 26 Oct 92 15:37:42
From: Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: first response

Dear Colleagues and Friends, I have just received Jerome McGann's
opening message, and I am as astounded at the format of these
proceedings as I am at the "theme" or "themes" of the symposium.
        My own particular concerns with respect to contemporary
Russian (or any other) poetry and poetics were, I think,
originally epistemological; they are still, to a large degree,
although my involvement (as translator) with the particular
writings of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko has enlarged that original,
abstract quandary with particular, immediate ones. In any case,
the question "how does one know" (the question of consciousness
and the quest for a consciousness of consciousness), becomes,
perhaps especially for an American, enormously vivid in the
otherness of a Russian context.
        I don't intend by this to be taking a relativist
position--that we can understand ourselves better by
understanding something else seems a banal and thoroughly
uninteresting truism. And to discover that certain American
literary groups have a similarity to certain Russian literary
groups is probably only to discover a coincidence--one which
might motivate curiosity but doesn't necessarily generate
meaning.
        The affinities that have evolved in the past five or six
years between certain poets in the U.S. and certain poets in
Russia exist, I think, because those poets wanted them to.
There's been a remarkable degree of seeking out--of which this
symposium is another example.
        My own personal initial experience in the course of this
seeking out was a dispersal of my American knowing in the Russian
context (could one call it a postmoderning of knowing?) where the
grounds for that knowing simply didn't exist. The experience
convinced me that knowledge is always embedded--always
contextualized (so that one only knows THAT something or OF
something, for example)--that is always and only situated and
that it depends on specific logics and linkages.
        Logics and linkages, of course, are precisely the
materials of poetic method.
        And perhaps our enthusiasm for their proliferation is a
specifically postmodern attitude. Finally, I'd like to say
something in answer to Jerome McGann's question, "what are we
doing in this very symposium, what are we after?" that I would
hope we are after some non- or even anti-nationalist engagement
with the man questions that postmodernism and postsovietism
suggest.

         Lyn Hejinian

Date:         Tue, 27 Oct 1992 19:36:58 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      remarks

S-Petersburg
27 October, 1992, 7:33 PM.
atd@hm.spb.su

Dear colleagues, it seems slightly strange to start any
"discussion" (even on postmodern) from the point of a
question -- "what all of us doing it for?.." Somehow or
other I have nothing to do but to continue offered mode
putting a great deal of questions to myself which entailed
by first two essays and followed remarks. The very problem
of Russian Postmodern to the same extent looks dark as well
as "American" or "African". Despite numerous writing on
this object the course of approach to it switches itself in
dizzying velocity. Couple years ago -- economical premises,
transformation of production modes or subjectivity per se,
social geterogenity, circulation of capital, signifiers,
Ego, etc. + notorious seductiveness, simulacra were really
magic formulas, even keys for operations with postmodern
phenomena (if one couldn't just to say that agglomeration
of them is in fact a certain composition, or invention of
its own horizons). Noticeable, that the last mentioned
terms have appropriated by Russian critics in a great
longing, corresponding, to be sure, to the roots of a main
principle of "Russian policy of representation"-- endless
chain of "icons" getting its origins in an invisible
prototype..) However we hear another voices now, another
songs -- "memory," "time," "space," "aesthetic" and so on.
Why not? It is entirely immaterial in _what_ terms, even
_sentence_ we are going to speak about present state of the
given object. Future is only a projection of our habits.
Right as _this symposium_ seems at a moment like iridescent
bubbles of a monitor in a soapy soup of imagination. As far
as I get it, essays by Marjorie Perloff and Barrett Watten
somehow or other attempted to touch different things
regardless of "concrete" stuff of reading. Sure, between
them -- diffusion of two different poetry practices/
consciousness despite the postmodern affirmation of
locality, the ways of such deterritorialisation (let us
recall a work of Veselovskii, dedicated to wandering
plots...). For all of that -- in MP essay evidently runs
itself the vein of the problem of interrelations of the
language of Father and artificial infant language of
Russian "conceptualism" that unfolds the ceaseless dream of
an ambiguous release trough the closing of meanings as such
in continuous repetitions of the certain rhetoric. (I think
Marjorie Perloff feels that explanations of this "event" by
Michael Epshtein are not only insufficient, still to some
respect -- wrong). And at least, the theme of memory rose
by Barrett Watten in his reading my poem. Sure, the _time-
memory-space_ questioning is most self-erasable "problem"
be tight connecting to such themes as body politics,
imagination strategy, etc., -- connecting postmodern's
ontic spectrum of worries with ontological ones. Perhaps,
if we'll have a time, I'll try offer you couple of pages
dedicated to "memory".

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

 
Date:         Fri, 30 Oct 1992 15:09:30 EST
From:         Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject:      second comment

October 30; I've only received Jerry's initial opening message
and Arkadii's first remarks (and a copy of my own first attempt
to enter this e-conversation), so maybe it is premature to add
something now.  But it does seem appropriate, both generally
(globally) and specifically (with respect to Russia and to the
U.S.) to frame the notion of postmodernism in the context of
"memory" (I am thinking of Arkadii's use of the term), since
among other things doing so blurs the distinction between
"objects" and "events." And it is this blurring that
characterizes the so-called end of history, postmodernism.
     Perhaps the Vietnam War (and the morally-related Watergate
scandal) helped to collapse U.S. history somewhat as perestroika
and the demise of the Soviet Union have collapsed history in
Russia. But maybe, again, the comparison is irrelevant; can we
compare Ezra Pound's and Charles Olson's and HD's (albeit very
different) attempts to recover history with Viktor Shklovsky's
and Vladimir Mayakovsky's and Anna Akhmatova's and Marina
Tsvetaeva's attempts to witness it? Such comparisons themselves
are typical dispersals.
     The notion of "memory" no longer suggests contemplation so
much as sentimentality (or its sister, irony), amorality, and
above all novel patterns of logic: "wandering" rather than
hierarchically organized plots. When the cause-and-effect
structuring which determines that an occurrence is an event
breaks down, the event becomes an object. This object isn't
necessarily isolated--it probably always rests in a matrix of
relationships and associations. But they are spatial and it is
atemporal.
     The beating of Rodney King has achieved instant
object-status. That's in part because it was "captured"
(objectified) on video tape and the tape has been repeated over
and over, and only objects, not events, can't repeat.
     Well, these quick remarks merely invite Arkadii's "couple of
pagesdedicated to 'memory'."
     And what of equivalence? In Arkadii's remarks it seems as if
numerous and various items and terms (the objects of concern)
swirl like motes in warm twilit sunshine, and this view is
familiar to me, too. One might be intelligent about any one, or
even several, of them,but perhaps not about the whole mass.

Lyn Hejinian

Date:         Fri, 30 Oct 1992 07:38:00 GMT
From:         Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Postmodern Symposium

Dear Colleagues, I came home from 10 days at Stanford to find
eleven messages, most about the symposium.  There are very
interesting comments from Lyn Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoschenko
that I want to mull over for a day or two.  In the meantime, I
want to address Jerome McGann'squestion, "Why did she (I) want to
write about this?  For me, the fascination of the Russian
language and the Russian world is endless. As someone who loves
the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde, but also
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, I want to understand what is
happening in the former Soviet Union today.  But since my Russian
is very minimal, I must rely on what I can read and I suppose I
wasn't quite satisfied with Ephshtein's account of what's going
on and wanted to speculate on the relationship between two
cultures, my point being that since "modernism," whatever that
is, hasn't quite been absorbed in Russia, it's hard to imagine a
"postmodernism" that would be parallel to our own late-century
versions.  On the other hand, a book like Hejinian's Oxota could
not have been written without the impact of the Russian poets,
writers, critics--the whole culture, so there's clearly something
wonderfully exciting going on.  But what exactly?  I hope to
learn more.  This past week, we have had on the Stanford campus
Joseph Brodsky, who was invited by the Stanford Humanities
Center.  I went to only one session--where Brodsky was talking
about Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.  He began by saying that
Pound and Eliot had deflected British Modernism from its true
path, epitomized by Hardy and then performed an analysis on "The
Convergence of the Twain."  Now, I want to ask my fellow
symposiasts: how do we relate Brodsky to the mode of
Dragomoschenko, Parshchikov, and the other "new wave" poets?

With best wishes, Marjorie Perloff

Date:         Sat, 31 Oct 1992 15:40:58 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      moving on in one step

31 October, 1992, 3:32 PM

Dear Lyn, dear colleges, I'm not certain that we _must_
speak only about memory (unconsciouses, traces, etc.) as
about of a main perspective of postmodern phenomena.
Nonetheless, this "term" is really provocative. Firstly,
because it involves varies "things" by virtue of which we
could get "something" concerning to our current state --
this is to say, about History, or -- to hove we like to
understand it, or to understand ourselves.

Two or three days ago, when we spend a time with Alexander
Zeldovich^1^ (he was back from Finland, and this time with
beautiful friend - Marianna) drinking bad wine but speaking
about global problems (exactly! yes! - typical Russian
manner of wasting of time, like "matreshka" or
"perestroika" and so forth) and when he paged first
"papers" from beginning of our symposium, he'd said --
"Write them, please, that there is very important thing --
We (Russia) are as a Bermuda triangle for all "-isms",
including postomdernism (which itself seems like the same
notorious "triangle"). It is a point that _every_ art's
mode, every direction transforms itself here in mode of
life!^2^ Moreover, this mode of life become "only one" way of
dealing with social space..." -- this is to say, with
history and memory. Isn't it? To some extent he was right
-- all our "revolutions" are the fruits of perverted
imagination. Meanwhile the time between -- was gifted by
devil. Where is memory? Or -- are we sentenced to be
the nation of an eternal Posmodern?

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
____________________
^1^ Well-known filmaker from Moscow - the last work was
"Sunset" on Babel. In the last issue of "Iskusstvo Kino"
(Art of Cinema) you can read our idle, "kitchen", talk
about the phenomena of "American Cinema".

^2^ I think this was the first impulse which Authors
of "Leningrad" got in Leningrad in 1989 (?).

Date:         Sat, 31 Oct 1992 17:05:50 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      memory

(out of the left field or -- )
EROTICISM OF FOR-GETTING, EROTICISM OF BEYOND-BEING(a) (1)

          by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; translated by
                         Vanessa Bittner with
                              Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
(Thank you, Lyn and Barrett, --
you participated in a hard business
of this translation too, preparing it
for the next issue of Poetics Journal...)

                         I entered - where I don't know
                         Understanding forsook me -
                         I stood -all knowledge departed.

                                   St. Juan de la Cruise

     There exist a multitude of things about which it
doesn't seem possible to talk, without risking a
meaningless pomposity, regardless of the fact that these
things continue to be a desired object of descriptions and
discussions, remaining not only as a horizon of experience,
but of the possibility of uttering something about it as
well.  Simultaneously such things seem illusorily ordinary-
habitual.  They are primordially vacillating and
mysterious, they whose senses are not grasped by reason,
which irritates the imagination, emitted and continue to
emit the unusually bewitching enchantment of the
strangeness of being -- which have already become a certain
semblance of sediment -- dictionaries willingly presenting
any rhetoric with this or that spectra of significance --
or: the history of the use of words or: the casts of former
"existential territorialities" (F. Guattari).

     Among such things can be found "memory".

     The kind proposal I received to deliver this paper
about memory led me to just another dead end of a certain
"beginning", despite the delicate indication of a path by
which thought could follow.

     And indeed, is it not tempting to fit the object of
our interest into historical and geopolitical perspective?
All the more, for me, having spent my life in a country
whose, let's say, more than marvelous relations with
"memory" and "history" were marked by the bewilderment of
Chaadaev, but thanks to which I received a rare opportunity
to contemplate her (memory's) surprising transformations,
both on the level of the individual and of society.  But
with time everything fades, including the sense of
surprise.  However and indeed doesn't the presence of
passion seduce the expressions: "peoples, having
remembered themselves or - having recalled their
destination and, the almost Platonic: "Man, having recalled
that he is a man"?  But I will stop here, not without basis
suggesting that this theme will find/has found worthy
illumination in presentations and discussions, so then how
should I, a person deeply private in his habits and work,
even if hurriedly and chaotically, touch upon an object of
conversation from a different side or, perhaps, sides.
More accurately, to remind about the existence of other
points of view.  Or at least the possibility of others.

     In the Malibu city museum in California there is a
thin gold plate measuring 22X37 mm bearing six engraved
lines, apparently a fragment of an orphick hymn, or
instructions to the soul of one who has died on how to
conduct themselves in the land of shades (2)

     Here are the lines whose literal translation is known
to many:

     But I am parched and perishing of thirst./Give
     me quickly/the cold water flowing from the Lake
     of/Memory/Then they will freely let you drink
     from/the holy spring,/and thereafter you will
     have lordship with/the other heroes.

     The spring mentioned in the above fragment is, of
course, Mnemosyne, Memory.  Whose moisture is opposed to
the waters of Leto.  Also, the opposition of "water of
life" and "water of death" is inferred in the duality of
the nature of someone who speaks, in other words, of the
simultaneous questioning and answering, the nature of which
combines the Earth-Titanic and the Sky-Dionysian.  However,
in defiance of the obvious banality of such a
"distribution" of roles and functions, something
nevertheless does not allow us, in reading these lines, to
see the painted plaster frieze of postmodernism.

      We will follow once again the well-trod path of plot,
taking into consideration as much as possible also the
amalgam of its narrative: the loss of memory is equal to
death; the dead who have entered the territory of Aida,
first of all lose their memory. (4)  The realm of Aida, the
world of night, is itself death or -- oblivion, then how
the day cannot stand unconsciousness -- forgetfulness
transforms itself into the death of the "future" (thus
Orpheus forgets the instructions, transgresses them and
turns around... to his own destruction) -- since memory is
nothing other than potential future, taking its origins in
duration, repitition, prolongation, the logic of which, as
is known, is the logic of history, narrative, day,
continuity, of causality, knowledge, law, the Norm.

     Within the borders of this logic, the structure of the
sign (or the mediation of it) is unequivocally manifested
by a direct connection between the "signifier and the
signified," where the signified is the memory of the
referent (the guarantee of the signifier's reality) of a
certain "object" and, more likely, the essence of this
object, reflected or revealed by the intelligible
signified.  A rupture or only the approximation of such a
connection, according to general opinion, of the loss of
referent, in other words, chaos, the destruction of the
hierarchic unity of the world picture in which, by the way,
the self identification of the "I" (as a reflection of the
true center of the Universe) and, consequently, of society
becomes impossible.  Thus, outside of memory, the becoming
of neither the "I" nor of the personality, self or social
can occur. Outside of "I" and outside of "the social"
narrative becomes impossible, the narrative itself, the
formative state making the world accessible to
understanding, to reproduction and to repetition -- the
content.

     In this horizon memory can be taken as the pre-writing
(see Plato about writing as an instrument of memory) which
must steadily uphold being in consciousness in the form of
traces, but, more than anything, the origins of those
traces.

     Actually, we know that memory is nothing other than a
means of consolidating, ordering, unifying the world map.
And which to some extent allows us to apply the analogy
between memory and the Eros of Plato, also forming the
world into an absolute ascent of cognition of the ascent
itself.  From here -- in spite of the fact that, for some,
memory is something like a depository, an archive or (for
others) a reserve of a mobilly difficult, associative
process of the conscious-unconscious, arises the motif of
her (memory's) teleologicity since it, like "the time of
history" (which memory forms) is directed at the
resurrection of that which, until recently remained as a
trace of a past (thing, person...) as the trace of which
the source was some sort of co-being/o-ccurence.(b)  Memory
is teleological, since it satisfies Absolute Memory or "the
embodiment of All the Ages" -- it satisfies Apokostasis, in
other words, the coincidence of "past-present-future" in
the point of presence, in the punctum of the endlessly
lasting "present" in which it, perfecting itself,
nevertheless, is already perfected since it doesn't know
incompleteness, lack or defect.  Or -- where memory has no
need for the resurrection of any traces, since there aren't
any, since there is no past as such.

     From this point of view any disruption of memory even
in everyday life is not only pathological, but a misdeed
appearing through the limit of definition and infringing
upon a definite conception of world study.  And here we
should not remark how in terms of the unfolding of the
description of its known conception of the "semantic" model
of the real, the thread of another ornament begins to
intertwine.  Suffice it to say that the Russian word
"pamiat'" (memory) covers perception with dust in a few
semantic layers:  1) that of "imeni"(c) (po(i)myanut' --
po-imenovat', po-minovenie -- po-imenovanie)(d) which
translates into English roughly as "to remember -- to
name", "remembrance -- naming", referring to being called,
concrete naming as to estate, in other words, to possession
since being called is an introduction to property,
appropriation; -- 2) of the first person pronoun, of the
accusative/genitive case: "mya" (from "menya") and 3) "men-
y", of the exchange (obmen) (in part of the sign for a
thing) closing the topology of ya-imeni-imeniya (I-name-
estate) to the act of power, submission and governing that
which stands apart, the external, non-articulated.(5)
Because -- as it follows from Western tradition's
experience, only in the title, in the re-tention (con-
tent)(e) of the name, in the retaining of the established
connection between name and thing the retention of the "I"
and the world is possible.  However, are there etymological
premises relevent, despite the seduction-ceremony of their
reading in the protocol of deconstruction, to the true mis-
en-scene of these meanings today?

It is difficult to refrain from making Jean Baudrillard's
statement about the transformation of the very nature of
the sign. To talk about Western culture means, in his
opinion, first of all to talk about the principles and
modes of its co-sociability(f), which must collect the
world into a single entity, more precisely, to return to it
its primordial wholeness (6), belief in this wholeness and,
nevertheless:

     All  the  Western  faith  and  good  faith  was
     engaged in  this wager on representation: that a
     sign  could   exchange  for   meaning  and  that
     something could  guarantee this exchange -- God,
     of course.  But  what  if  God  himself  can  be
     simulated, that  is to say, reduced to the signs
     which  arrest  his  existence?  Then  the  whole
     system  becomes  weightless;  it  is  no  longer
     anything but a gigantic simulacrum. (7)

Of course, if we touch upon positions, which must some way
or another guarantee the "symbolic exchange", it would be
more important to consider the instance "pure, invulnerable
(absolute) memory", along with that and "space" in which
such an exchange is possible, that is, a gigantic
simulation machine (8) - "absolute historical memory"
(Nietzsche). But even having proposed such absolute memory,
we can say that being completely-almighty, memory is
powerless to penetrate, bring out, preserve one thing --
the sources of one's own co-being/o-ccurence(g) the trace
of which is memory itself.  It's strange "beginning", the
striving to remember, to preserve the function of Freud's
Thanatos constantly slips away, having become memory before
carrying the name of forgetfulness (h) which exists between
its infinite impulse to activity, to work, to
repetition/creation.(i)  The writing of poetry bears a
close relation to this.

     The reverse of memory spreads oblivion.  But what
happens there?

     Once again the Russian verb "zapamyatovat'", "to
forget"(j) means to go out beyond memory, beyond its
limits, consequently to cross the border of "mya", that is,
"I" ("ya"), "name" (imeni), "self-property" (imenie). But
what, then, can be found "beyond" (k)?  Only the "absence
of definition"?  Of duration?  Of continuity?  Of that from
which the word habitually develops in propositions and
modalities?  Simply "absence"?  Or maybe we'll phrase the
question another way: what happens in the very act of
"forgetting"?  Doesn't language itself point out in its
etymological luminescence that for-getting/beyond-being is
literally a transgression (9), that is, a crime(l) of being
(m), waste of reserve, or otherwise, of the former
existence as from the noun created from the verb, otherwise
-- a twice-halted present? Such is poetry, immutably and
courageousely going out to the border, where the dark glow
of the indifferent something, unheard of, having never
existed, but the Genesis "of which", penalizing not even
the word "time"(n), meets the concealing smoke of human
vanity.

     Beyond the border of memory, if we believe in the
topography of Preispoden(o) (reverse-side) we find Leto.
On her banks grow poppies. On her shores oblivion reigns,
the transparency of which is transmitted to the world,
drawn into her game, confusing one with another, the times
and intentions, words and silence, -- opening the
transparency of the absence of any scales whatsoever - here
"this" is simultaneously "there", "now" - everywhere
"after" or "already always then".  The waters of Leto never
reflect -- it is that place, locus classicus(p) -- where
the myth of Narcissus, seduced by the yearning for another
in himself, ceases to be a source of light in the mirrored
rooms of the human "I"(10).  Peering into the sources,
memory enters into the most intimate and closest relations
with Oblivion, which represents to her (memory) her own
death.  It is impossible to imagine a certain smile which
is so easy to take for an enigmatic grimace... but where
then do pains come from?

     And here the conclusion of the fragment from the gold
plate becomes clear -- the question is full of perplexity
since the questioner in the question-answer about its
double nature nevertheless confirms its belonging to
Heaven, to Dionysus, Transgression, Oblivion, Poetry --
that is, the body of language, speech, which confirms
itself to being torn to shreds, to dismemberment by the
Titans, by Mimesis, having seized him (the questioner) in
the labyrinth of the mirror, in the labyrinth of logic
which rules reflection (vt/tv-orenie;
repitition/creation)(q), in other words of that which is
always seen as the basis of the art of speech... There is
no point in continuing the list of that which, according to
the critics, "reflects" or "depicts/represents", at the
same time appropriating, the word... It doesn't appropriate
but removes layer by layer from the wax table of memory-
warp that by definition possesses neither meaning or trace,
that... which exists in its own disappearance.

     However, Night attracts even this mute rustling.
Night, like poetic speech is sourceless and so steps over,
erasing any possible interpretation, her language, her
speech, her intentions , her now, her memory.  Squandering
all of this in her own disappearance, poetry possesses
nothing,

only:

**********

Author's Notes:

2) It is noteworthy that this memorandum is inscribed on
material whose nature is ambivalent in its presentation -
gold, sun, and light are inseparable in the mythological
consciousness from ashes (in the Russian language the very
etymology of this word points to their unanimity). Sunlight
is in the same way life-creating, ash-creating and light
itself, more precisely its source, the sun, is inseparable
from "darkness", blindness, like a vision through the wall
of optico-centrism, which controls not only epistemiology
but the metaphysics of culture.

3) The motif which the British poet Robert Graves used in
one of his poems and which I have added to the final piece
of "Ksenia" in part as an answer to Graves.

4) The thirst for memory is equal to the thirst for blood -
a drop of blood gives a moment of memory to the soul of a
dead person.

5) Unfortunately, there is not room here to refer to yet
another nuance of meaning, ehich adds through the meaning
of the word "mnit'" -- to imagine, and for this reason a
signficant problem of memory -- imagination does not fall
in with the intent of today's discussion.  In connection
with this it seems to me that Bashlyarovsky's dream should
not be considered exactly as non-memory, as non-
imagination.

6) See Lyotard's meta-recite.

7) Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Stanford U. Press,
1988, p. 170. ("All of Western faith and good faith was
engaged in this wager on representation:  that a sign could
refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange
for meaning and that something could guarantee this
exchange - God, of course.  But what if God himself can be
simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which
attest his existence?  Then the whole system becomes
weightless; it is no longer anything but a giant
simulacrum...")

8) Precisely this point, apparently, compels J.L. Borges to
create the metaphor Funes-Miracle-Memory, a metaphor of the
reciprocal devouring of memory and the remembered: of their
factual, monstrous coincidence.

9) Jacques Derrida makes the following distinction between
transgression and reduction-epoche: "The phenomenological
epoche is a reduction that pushes us back toward meaning.
Sovereign transgression is a reduction of this reduction:
not a reduction to meaning, but a reduction of meaning."
Jacques Derrida.  Writing and Difference.  U. Chicago
Press, 1978. p. 268.

10) Memory-mirror-titans; the torn, dismembered Dionysus,
etc.

11) From the book XENIA (by this author)? Lyn has this
poem.

Translator's notes:

a. The Russian prefix "za-" in the works of this author
reflects the multivalency of one word or invented words due
to the creative morphology of the language.  The existing
word "zabyvanie" means literally "forgetting".  But there
is also a verb "byvat", "to be", which the author here
fuses with the prefix "za-" which can mean "trans-" or, as
a preposition, "behind", "beyond", "at", "after", "because
of".  The noun "zabyvanie" does not exist in Russian (no!
Vanessa is wrong!), therefore the meaning is open to
interpretation and associations.

b. "sobytie" without hyphen means "happening, occurence,
event" which, according to the author, is the result of
"co-being".

c. "imeni" is a declined form of "imya", "name" in the
nominative case.

d. the author inserts an "i" into the root of the verb
"pomyanut'" ("to remember") to emphasize what he sees as
the semantic connection between the words.

e. In Russian these two words have identical roots but
different prefixes - uderzhanie, soderzhanie.

f. "so-obshitel'nost'" hinting at the word "soobshit'" to
inform, announce and "obshitel'nost'" - sociability.

g. see note b.

h. this word also contains the elements "za" and "byt" and
could also allude to the verb "zabyt'" - to forget. See
also note a.

i. a play on sounds/words: "vtorenie-tvorenie".  The first
word does not exist (O, Vanessa, dear, this word exists
too) on its own but the "vtor" root implies repeating,
something done a second time. The second word literally
means creation or creating; the consonant pair is simply
reversed or "turned around".

j. "zapamyatovat'" is a less commonly used form of the verb
"zabyvat'/zabyt'", "to forget", and, as the reader can see,
contains both the particles "za" and "mya".

k. see note a.

l. "prestuplenie" which literally means "crime", is
semantically related to the verb "perestupat'/perestupit'"
meaning "to step over" and figuratively "to overstep,
transgress", thus linking the words "crime" and
"transgression".

m. as taken from the verb "byvat'".

n. "vremya" ("time") which contains the elements "mya" and
"ya" from the preceding discussion.

o. Tartarus of Greek mythology.

p. in Latin in the original.

q. See note i.

Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1992 14:46:37 EST
From:         Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject:      xeniaX-To:  symposia@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu

November 1, Sunday:

Dear Colleagues: I'm amused that our symposium in its first week
has resembled my only other e-mail experience, namely messages
from Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; I bought a modem solely in order to
communicate with him during the long period when Soviet and then
Russian postal system was only sporadically operative, and when
strange (good) fortune gave Arkadii access to e-mail.
       In any case, both Arkadii and Eyal have asked me to add
something from Arkadii's forthcoming booklength poem XENIA to our
discussion. The American translation (in manuscript) is a little
over 100 pages long, and it's difficult to excerpt from the
whole, since the "argument" accumulates, like an unfolding
discourse (or in multiple discourses).  So I've decided just to
send you the first several pages, with the alternation between
poetry and prose which is characteristic of the work as a whole.
       The essay on Memory that Arkadii sent to us, by the way,
will be published in POETICS JOURNAL (the next issue), but the
version you read is slightly rough (no fault of the author's or
Vanessa Bittner's--Arkadii's prose is very difficult to
translate) and we will try to revise a bit before
publication--with Vanessa's help.

       from XENIA

                    You see the mountains
                    and think them immobile
                    but they float like clouds.
                         Al-Djunayd
We see only what
we see

only what
lets us be ourselves--
seen.

The photograph refuses
to let into itself
what it created by studying us.
The frenzied braiding of salts,
                         ashes of silver.

A cock will crow three times
as dawn arrives. Sight
(in a game of tossed bones? an opening in the body?
shoelaces?
in the autobiography approaching
from behind your head?), finding
no object, seems lost.

History begins
only when powerlessness is acknowledged. I
can't understand: the embraces of father and mother?
The transition of one to the other?
This is the boundary dancing at the threshold
where an echo slowly floats around reason.

To go on.

Death is not an event, but an ex-
foliation:
the past is a knot of ellipses--
                              noon
with the sun spot removed
whose depths are raised to the simple surface
by the mosquito wind of things,

objects' chips, sucked
in vain
into description--sight--
or the rules for rendering
a two-dimensional representation multi-dimensional--
a question of optics (or allegories).

Flight fades into the porous yellow ice
of the pages flowering between the dry fingers.
The smoke is black.

               The azure's shrieking.

Senselessly cloud falls to the south.
And stuck together, like candies of happiness,
demons with their meditations control the eyes
like fire whose net is irridescent and plain
and monotonous too
like the pendulum of love.

It's not death that's "disturbing," but rather--
until one is able to move in metabolic particles--
the absence discovered at every point in the splash
                              of the day
whose halves are shut
behind the shadow's back (yes, definitely, embraces,
before all else) everywhere

where it can occur
coupling non-becoming with intercession--

the unravelled tissue's decay. Speed.
Skid. The division of time: the roar in a child's seashell.
Surroundings.
The site of wandering examines
its own expectations. The mouth
takes on a definite form
so that the word sky takes on the density of pebbles
smashing the shell of reflections.

Now for the story of the branching city. Complexity doesn't mean
endless additions. The proto-perception of dreams. The multitudes
are mutinous (the more money you give me the more I'll have--and
what do you need it for?). This playful twig sticks up in the
air: attentiveness. But also the epistolary style, exhaustive,
following trackes (are you talking about me? the day before
yesterday you said that you needed me in order to experience
yourself through me), evading possible signs, one's own presence,
Khlebnikov--the ruins of never-erected cyclopic constructions. A
stellar swarming in the absolute transparency of subject and
object. The rustle of a stone flying downward. Slowly I bend
toward you. The slope is open to the south wind. What for you is
a moment, for me is a millenium, augmented by anticipation.
Patience? The foreknowledge that is fated not to answer questions
about death--not to sprout in the skull of matter. Unhurried
oxydation, but also the epistolary method, reaching an
inadmissable surplus: an intersec/ruption, not giving the sought
for sense of conclusion in any point of the splash, rousing the
night with ex-. What distinguishes a "judgment" from an
"utterance"? Look in the dictionary, you say. Look in the
dictionary and the word is already turning into the word that
endlessly approximates a fading voice. As for snow in the
branching story of the city. I bend down toward her and in front
of me the thinnest droplet discloses the time frame of China.
Behind the window there's snow. No. Contaminations of the city.
We'll bring this elm into the map's field. A crow, not knowing
loss. Instead, so as to come nearer, opening--it moves away,
until it disappears completely beyond the boundaries of the
phrase.

*********
translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Sun and Moon
Press will be publishing the book in January of next year. My
apologies for any typos--I don't know how to call up files into
my e-mail program, so anything you get from me is typed "in
realtime"--and generally, as fast as I can type it.

Lyn Hejinian

 
Date:         Tue, 3 Nov 1992 16:28:22 -0500
From:         "Jerome J. Mc Gann"

Subject:      memory again

I was moved to the following reflections after reading Arkadii's
essay.  I would be much interested in any other reactions.

               "Thoughts on `Zapamyatovat'"

     What follows are some reactions to Arkadii D's
essay/meditation "Eroticism of For-Getting, Eroticism of
Beyond-Seeing".  I am moved to write them because AD's essay
exposes some of the most cherished illusions of the west.  And
also because from the west may yet come (do now come, and have
been coming always) other voices and imaginations that stand
counter to those mostcherished in Memory.  Other possible
"memories".
     AD mentions Plato in passing -- Plato, who deplored writing
because it threatened one of his touchstone values: Memory.  But
according to Lyn H "Writing is an Aid to Memory".
     LH's is a distinctly anti-platonic thought.  And what she
means by "Memory" is not at all what Plato means.  Plato's is the
meaning you, AD, sketch in the opening of your essay -- the
meaning of the known and ordered world, the remembered world.
     AD also mentions Baudrillard, a quintessential (or so we
have judged) "postmodern thinker".  His however is, I believe,
the deconstructive dead end of the Platonic/Enlightenment line.
Out ofthe ground of reality Baudrillard spins the precession of
the simulacra.  Or: either Memory or Oblivion.  Being and
Nothingness. Presence and Absence.  And all these ordered along
the platonic grid of "the real" (the Forms) and the "unreal" (the
Shadow plays).
     "But what if God himself can be simulated, reduced to . .
.signs?  Then the whole system becomes. . . a gigantic
simulacrum."(Baudrillard)  In Baudrillard this famous question
comes as a deconstructive threat -- is posed as such, is received
as such (generally).
     That is to say, Baudrillard is not serious.
     But Baudrillard may be taken seriously.  His whole system
canbe reduced to a system of signs, a gigantic simulacrum, as
ideal as god himself.  Himself.
     We may think otherwise than this -- say, according to Blake,
for whom all gods reside in the human breast.  God (to be
capitalized here as the subject of this sentence) and the gods
always were creatures of the human imagination, ie, in postmodern
terms, constructed systems of signs; it was merely a special
system of signs -- one that asserted it wasn't a signifying
system, but was self-identical ("I am that I am"), that (mis)led
us into the transcendental imagination of reality.
     "Absolute historical memory" in this perspective is a
special conception -- a heuristic tool, literally a signifying
system.  We must not take it for either god or the "set of all
(memorial) sets".  It is simply (and profoundly) the idea of such
a set -- an idea we may want to invoke and use for particular
immediate and practical purposes.
     So, "zapamyatovat": "to go beyond memory", to cross
itsborder, is to enter another territory, the geography of
"oblivion".  Here is Leto, the land (in English) of Swinburne:
     Here where the world is quiet,
     Here where all trouble seems
     Dead winds and spent waves' riot
     In doubtful dreams of dreams. . . .etc.
Most emphatically not an "absence" or a nothing: it is
"positivenegation" (terrifying to Coleridge's idealistic mind,
splendid andcomforting to Swinburne's sensational mind).  To
enter this (new)world is (in William Morris's words) to "Forget
six counties overhung with smoke", etc.  It is to get, literally,
"News from Nowhere".
     "Zapamyatovat": we have no such wonderful word in our
language, so I thank you for it, AD.  But it is a word known to
all the poets, and especially to those for whom there is a world
of imagination.  The Swinburnian Land of Oblivion, Byron's
Manfred, Blake's Los[s].

jerome mcgann

 
From: jenglish@sas.upenn.edu (James English)
Subject: Rabate/Chernetsky
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 21:47:27 EST

To the symposium participants:

     Having only recently arrived from France to take up his new
post at the University of Pennsylvania, Jean-Michel Rabate is
having difficulties getting set up with functional computer
hardware and software.  The computer that has just been installed
in his office, for example, is equipped with a French keyboard
but can only read the keyboard input as though it were standard
American.  In any event, Jean-Michel regrets that it is
impossible for him to participate in the symposium.  He has,
however, solicited a response to the early symposium postings
from Vitaly Chernetsky, a colleague in the Comparative Literature
and Theory department.  I have slightly edited Vitaly's text,
which follows.

               --Jim English

        WHY THE RUSSIAN POSTMODERN?

       "Russian postmodernism: an oxymoron?"--this is the
question posed by the title of Marjorie Perloff's essay.  What
happens to the cultural phenomenon which according to most
cultural theorists is the product of late capitalism, consumer
society, commodity culture, etc., when it is transposed into the
society where the most basic commodities are in short supply?
And if there exists Russian (or, more correctly, Soviet)
postmodern culture, how does it sustain the claim of being
postmodern, in what postmodernist activities does it engage?  To
my disappointment, I found that what Russian postmodernism is
is precisely the question Perloff's essay is not willing to
address.  Perloff's agenda seems to be only to underscore that
the two groups--the heterogeneous Russian postmodern poets and
the American language poets--differ considerably; her way of
proving it seems to be to claim that cultural production in the
late Soviet Union has little if anything to do with its Western
postmodern contemporaries.  Although she herself admits that "to
generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous,"
Perloff is nevertheless willing to do so.  In this I see a
possibility that a forum like ours could degenerate into an
enterprise which I would call "paleontological": to
"reconstruct," as Georges Cuvier claimed to be able to do with a
prehistoric animal, the entire Russian postmodern scene out of
one or two of its "bones."  Need one to say that the postmodern
culture is not a coherent "organism," and that in these
paleontological attempts we end up creating ghosts like the
mysterious Foma Akvinskii (instead of St. Thomas Aquinas) who
appears in the English translation of Aleksei Parshchikov's essay
"New Poetry" in _Poetics Journal_?  Can we thus hope actually to
produce a meaningful discussion and not just a simulacrum of it?
      Another problem that I find potentially present in the
argument advanced by Perloff and some other critics is reducing
postmodernism from a culture's condition simply to a movement or
even a sum total of stylistic devices (unfortunately, that also
happens to be the predominant view of postmodernism expressed by
the Russian critics within the former Soviet Union).  And, in my
opinion, it is the question why the culture both in the US and in
the former USSR has taken the forms it did, what are these
changes symptomatic of, that needs most urgently to be addressed.
      It has been said at various occasions that "cultural
phenomena that reached [Russia] from the West. . . acquired
features utterly unfamiliar to their progenitors and relate to
their Western kin only in name" (Dmitrii Prigov, interview in
_Poetics Journal_ 8, pp. 12-13).  Many would argue that it were
often not even the phenomena themselves but rather the names for
them.  The case often seems to be that the names were
appropriated for various cultural practices which were not
imported from the West, but conditioned in their emergence by
Russian culture's internal development.  But the very fact that
the shapes taken by this cultural production happened to have
striking similarities with their Western counterparts suggests
that the homology goes further than it might seem at first; and
one does not need to be labeled a Slavophile when one asserts
that sometimes Russian practitioners of culture may even be ahead
of their colleagues abroad (remember Marinetti's amazement when
upon his arrival in Russia he was told by the Russian Futurists
that he wasn't going far enough in handling language).  Marjorie
Perloff seizes upon the vague, almost "impressionistic"
formulations ofEpstein's account of contemporary Russian poetry,
easily susceptible to criticism.  I would like to draw attention
to another essay by Epstein, "After the Future: On the New
Consciousness in Literature,"the English translation of which was
published in the Spring 1991 issue of _South Atlantic Quarterly_,
one of the most noteworthy attempts to date of theorizing the
cultural condition of the late Soviet empire, stating that "by
the 1980s, the basic premises ofartistic consciousness in [the
USSR] were quite postmodern, perhaps even more radically and
consistently than in the West."  "Was it not the case," writes
Epstein,
      that our culture began creating simulacra, that is, the
      utmost faithful copies that do not have an original,
      much earlier and in greater quantities that in the West?
      How does one have to deal with the figure of Brezhnev,
      embodying the 'businesslike constructive approach' and
      'the progressive development of the mature socialism?'
      In difference with the sinisterly modernist, Kafkaesque
      figure of Stalin [here Epstein's point of view is akin to
      that of Boris Groys, elaborated in his The Total Art of
      Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and
      Beyond (Princeton, 1992), who interprets Stalin's Soviet
      Union as a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a
      total(itarian) work of art; this also leads us to assert
      once more the profound homology of totalitarianisms in
      the fascist and Soviet states which both embarked on
      aesthetisizing the political project (see Walter Benjamin's
      "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
      Reproduction" in his Illuminations)], Brezhnev is a
      typical simulacrum, a postmodernist perfunctory object,
      even a hyperrealistic object of some kind, behind which
      there is no reality to be found.  Long before the
      Western video technology started creating in abundance
      true-to-life images of the nonexistent reality, this task
      was already being solved by our ideology, media,
      statistics that counted up to a hundredth of a percent
      the crop that had never been gathered." (440 [I have
      modified the translation to be closer to the original
      Russian.])
"The triumph of the self-valorizing ideas," he continues, "that
imitate and abolish reality assisted in creating the
postmodernist mentality not less than the domination of video
communications which also create the folded in itself world of
the transfixed time" (443, modified translation again).
      Since I have brought up Boris Groys's book which from the
moment of its original publication in German provoked a heated
debate among the academics engaged in the study of Russian
culture, I would like to point out some of this book's
unquestionable merits.  Groys positions the cultural production
which occasioned the present forum within the context of the
Soviet empire's own development.  I strongly disagree with
Marjorie Perloff when she talks about "the long midcentury hiatus
of Stalinist years."  While from the point of view of aesthetic
value (recently a very much attacked concept) culture of the
Stalin years probably loses the competition with cultural
products of other times and places, its aesthetical system, its
governing logic should by no means be discarded by a cultural
theorist.  Recently there have been trends to explain Stalinist
art both as a modernist and as a postmodern phenomenon.  In fact,
in Groys's book the two seem to be conflated, as manifested, for
example, in his insightful remark that "Stalinist culture looks
upon itself as postapocalyptic--the final verdict on all human
culture has already been passed."  "Socialist realism,"
Groyscontinues, "regards historical time as ended and therefore
occupies no particular place in it" (48, 49).  Of socialist
realism's simulacric concern with verisimilitude he writes:
      Its heroes . . . must thouroughly resemble people if
      people are not to be frightened by their true aspect,
      and this is why the writers and artists of socialist
      realism bustle about inventing biographies, habits,
      clothing, physiognomies, and so on.  They almost seem
      to be in employ of some sort of extraterrestrial bureau
      planning a trip to Earth--they want to make their
      envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot
      keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the
      cracks in the mask. (63)
      We must, then, talk not about a Russian postmodernism, but
probably about three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of
Stalin years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new
post-Soviet culture which is probably emerging now.  The culture
that our forum is trying to address, then, could be named the
postmodernism of the late (using both meanings of the word
"late") Soviet empire.  The fascinatingly rich scene of the new
Russian poetry that emerged during the past fifteen years or so
has been rather unlucky in the critical/theoretical treatment it
received.  Attempts at analysis ended up in imposition of rigid
classificatory grids (a project suspicious tobegin with), and if
Epstein's trichotomy "conceptualism/metarealism/presentism"
offered in his essay "Metamorphosis" (a bowdlerizedversion of
which appears as an afterword to _Third Wave_) is debatable,
Wachtell's and Parshchikov's pseudo-Bakhtinian dichotomy
"monological/pluralistic" found in their "Introduction" to
_ThirdWave_, which happens to place all of conceptualists and
those close to them under the former rubric, is hair-raising.
The merit of"Metamorphosis" is that, despite all its weaknesses,
it is still the only attempt to date in any language to offer a
somewhat coherent and inclusive picture of the new wave of
Russian poetry (why this wave should be counted "third" remains a
mystery to me).  Perloff finds Russian conceptualism not standing
up to its name, seeing in it the urge to "expose." If anything,
this urge to "expose" (inaugurated in Russian culture by
Vissarion Belinsky [1811-1848]) is something quite alien to the
works in question; they do not"expose"--they deconstruct.  In
fact, they precisely "take up the challenge presented by Duchamp"
(Perloff about Western conceptualism).  How else would you
classify V. Komar and A.Melamid's gesture of signing the Lenin
"quotation" "Our goal is communism"?  (This quote was to be found
multiplied through millions of posters all over the Soviet
Union.)  And, to look in the realm of poetry, doesn't, for
example, such a specimen of American language poetry as Bob
Perelman's poem "China," which Fredric Jameson analyses in his
essay "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logicof Late Capitalism,"
strikingly resemble "catalogs" by the Russiancon ceptualist Lev
Rubinshtein (which returns us to Wachtell's and Parshchikov's
puzzling gesture of calling Russian conceptualist poets
"monological")?
      What, then, I would suggest as a possible course of
discussion--which has already been begun by our forum and which
should by all means be continued--is both to try to investigate
the multiplicity of paradigms of postmodern cultural production
in the former Soviet empire, to try to single out in what and why
it is both similar to and different from cultural phenomena found
in the US and the rest of the Western world, and, most
importantly, to theorize these similarities and differences.  A
Russian proverb says that "the first pancake comes out lumpy"
(pervyi blin--komom).  Even if that might be the case, it should
by no means stop us from frying more of them.

Vitaly Chernetsky
University of PA

From:         Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Vitaly Chernetsky's essay

This is precisely the sort of response I hoped the symposium
would generate.  Vitaly Chernetsky is right, of course, to say
that my remarks were superficial; indeed, I only wanted to raise
an issue that had come upbecause certain parallels were being
drawn between the "language" poetsand "new Russian" poets that I
found dubious and I was having a hardtime finding a connection.
It's still hard: for a foreigner to understand the
modernist/postmodernist strains in the Stalinist era is difficult
and what we now need--and I hope will get from people like
Chernetsky--is afuller account than the one Wachtel and
Parschchikov give us in Third Wave of what the cultural
determinants are and now they relate.  But I would like to ask
Chernetsky how he proposes that those of us with little or no
Russian begin?  Is there a bibliography he can suggest?  An
important cultural study that might help U.S. readers? I would be
very grateful for such information.  From the "lumpy pancake,"

Marjorie Perloff

Date:         Tue, 10 Nov 1992 14:54:45 EST
From:         Bob Perelman 
Subject:      Russian postmodernism

November 10: Dear Colleagues: My first impulse is toward what
Jakobson might term the phatic: hello, contact, tweet, cheep,
bow-wow.

Lyn, if I had _The Guard_ here I would love to quote the lines
where you mime the operation of translating from the Russian, to
the effect that the dog says quack, the goat says gruss or
whatever. That seems emblematic of the space between contemporary
Russian and American poetry. Vitaly, when I read that "China"
"strikingly resembles" Lev Rubinshtein's catalogs, it feels like
"quack" where I expect "bow-wow." I.e.,

 8.
 Foo! Right here in nearby dale
 Heartthrobs at the nightingale!

 9. Mischievous small nightingale
 Singing always in the dale!
 . . . .

 32.
 People surely get th' idea,
 If they're just not idiots!

 33.
 People are not idiots,
 Even if they miss th'idea! [_Third Wave_, 139, 141]

 There is something going on there involving, I would guess,
sarcasm directed against the vatic mode; doggerel as vehicle for
generous social emotion; repetion & permutation. But so much must
be happening at the level of tone, aggressive echoes of cultural
memory, that I'm at a loss to find much similarity to my own
work.

 Arcadii, rereading your "Nasturtium," I thought of Williams's
"Crimson Cyclamen." Not that the following sets of lines are all
that much 'alike':

 Blades pocked with repetition
 (forty seconds spent searching for an analogy
                          to the upward branching
 at the throat of the stem--instead
 of this: "the emotions are
 a component of composition, and the expression,
       itself branching out into exclamation,
 means as much as
 the comma which proceeds its appearance")   [_Description, 99]

 The stem's pink flanges,
 strongly marked,
 stand to the frail edge,
 dividing, thinning
 through the pink and downy
 mesh--as the round stem
 is pink also--cranking
 to penciled lines
 angularly deft
 through all, to link together
 the unnicked argument
 to the last crinkled edge--
 where the under and the over
 meet and disappear
 and the air alone begins
 to go from them--
 the conclusion left still
 blunt, floating
 . . . .
 each petal tortured

 eccentrically
 the while, warped edge
 jostling
 half-turned edge

 side by side
 until compact, tense
 evenly stained
 to the last fine edge

 an ecstacy       [_Collected Poems_, Vol 1, 421, 423]

It's just an analogy of course, but it strikes me that the
distance between poem and flower, made central in "Nasturtium"
and refused if not refuted in "Cyclamen," is like the distance
between critical apprehension and poetry in many cases. In my own
unofficial thought about these matters, and in the emphatically
phatic contact zone of e-mail, such distances sholdn't exist, are
false projections, reified backdrops for auratic arias.
Nevertheless, as Williams puts it in "The Descent":

 Postmodernism beckons
       as modernism beckoned.
               Critical genealogy is a kind

 of art prose,
       a sort of poetics,
               even

 a poem, since the lines it rewrites are new lines
       read by readers
               heretofore unaddressed,

 unmarked--
       since their eyes
               are focused on new media
 (even though formally these were unaccredited).

 No poem is made up entirely of language--since
       the channels it leases are always conduits
               formerly unarticulated. A

 world lost,
       a world unarticulated,
               beckons to new genres
 and no aesthetic value (trashed) is so valuable as the memory
 of value

Among others things, I hope the above will be heard as
counterpoint to Arcadii's "Eroticism of For-getting."

Date:         Thu, 12 Nov 1992 14:31:08 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      idle talk

Dear colleagues,

For me to answer some of the questions posed by Mr.
Chernetsky or to oppose some of his arguments I would have
to get back to my first remark about endless love of
Russian criticism to Baudrillard's rhetoric which it
believes is the most relevant instrument in studying the
contemporary culture and the rest.

But in this article I was most interested by some of his
digressions which bring back memories of critical discourse
of the time of Socialist Realism. so dear to the author of
the article.  For example - "sometimes Russians practicers
of culture may even be ahead of their colleagues abroad"...

Certainly, nobody  claims inventing postmodernism but
still... sometimes it happens! But what on earth being
ahead means? Ahead of what? The head of a foreign
colleague? Then what is a system of coordinates for the
action? What do we refer ourselves to? A beginning? Then a
beginning of what? Or an end? An end of history?

No matter what all the subsequent reflections of Chernetsky
on post-modernism will necessarily have to be looked at in
the perspective of History reaching its completion. History
which is not short of time, space or any features of
creativity. Background of orthodox vision is obvious even
in the very beginning of the passage quoted by Chernetsky,
from Michael Epshtain - "our culture began creating
simulacra (sic!) <...> much erlyer and in greater
quantities..." . That is for sure. Dating back to the
polemics of the Nicaea Council in 767 on _kenosis_ through
the endless discussions of symbolism and up to the very
recent past...

In fact, all of this reminds of an attempt to play a game
of chess using Go stones. As much as Michael Epshtain's
poetic taxonomy. Just in case, one should keep in mind that
it owes a lot to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis which
according to Kassirer "fundamental altered the biological
ideal of knowledge".

And so on, and so forth. Meanwhile, to touch again our
favorite conceptualism again seems pointless - it's as
infinite as any other projection. But sometimes I can't but
ponder whether the known slogan Jedem das Seine can
become a cliche which being involved into the practice of
ironic rethinking would become a surplus meaning of
today's culture. Lyn Hejinian is right -- irony is a twin
sister of nostalgia.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

 
     From: Mikhail Epstein, Department of Russian Studies, 403
     Candler Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322.

     To: Editors of PMC and all participants of the discussion on
     Russian postmodernism.

     November 15, 1992

     Dear colleagues and friends:

          I am entering the discussion with a delay because of my
     inability to cope with such a "postmodern" technical device
     as e-mail, which argues in favor of those who resist any
     parallels between Russian and Western "postmodern"
     mentalities.  My theoretical standpoint, however, is the
     relevance of these typological parallels: not in the sense
     that Russia belatedly "caught up with" the Western
     postmodernism, but in terms of their "alternate" (and
     complementary) developments, in such a way that Russia was
     the first to embrace the "post-apocalyptic" sensibility of
     postmodernism, whereas the West was the first to identify
     this sensibility in theoretical concepts and to give it the
     name of "postmodernism." Vitaly Chernetsky's proposal "to
     talk not about a Russian postmodernism, but probably about
     three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of Stalin
     years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new post-
     Soviet culture which is probably emerging now" seems to me
     the most promising point of departure and the possible core
     of our subsequent discussion.  Vitaly Chernetsky refers to
     Boris Grois's book which regards Stalin's state as the
     fulfillment of modernist (avant-gardist) project; it should
     be added that the accomplishment of such a project (if it
     really was a success) transported Russian-Soviet culture
     into a new, postmodernist, "post-apocalyptic" dimension.  No
     more tension between the modernist project and reality: this
     is already postmodernism (at least the gates to this kingdom
     of simulacra).
          I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper
     on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship
     with the Western one.  The paper was presented at the MLA
     conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie
     Perloff's and Barrett Watten's papers now proposed for this
     discussion.  Also, I will cite several passages from my
     recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for
     the purely "ideological", "Eastern" version of postmodernism
     as opposed to Fredric Jameson's influential theory which
     connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the "late
     capitalism" and therefore denies its possibility in non-
     Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, _Relativistic Patterns
     in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological
     Language_.  Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies.
     Occasional Papers,  # 243.  Washington: Woodrow Wilson
     International Center for Scholars, 1991).  What I am going
     to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in
     Russian criticism where the question of "post-modernism"
     became as focal as the concept of "socialist realism" was in
     the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the
     later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier
     one).  In particular, I would like to address you to the
     articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn "Post-modernism: new ancient
     culture" and Sergei Nosov "Literature and Play", accompanied
     by editorial comments in _Novyi Mir_ (Moscow), 1992, No.2.
     pp.225-239.

     [Editor's note: Mikhail Epstein's work is included in the
     file SYMPOS-2.193 in this issue of PMC.]

 
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1992 12:02:21 EST
From:         "(James English)" 
Subject:      Vitaly C. Remarks

To the Symposium participants:

Here is a follow-up correspondence on the Third Wave from Vitaly
Chernetsky.
                                               --Jim English

Dear Bob, dear colleagues:
     It is always a dangerous enterprise to offer a reading
(especially a sketchy one) in the presence of the author(s) of
the text(s) one is talking about.  I still believe that comparing
Bob's "China" to some of Lev Rubinshtein's work (notice: I am not
attempting to establish an equation between larger corpuses of
their works) is not entirely a misreading (a "quack" when on
expects a "bow-wow").  By the way, in Russian the ducks say
"krya-krya" and the dogs say "gav-gav," but still one can say
with a degree of certainty that Russian ducks and dogs (and other
creatures) "strikingly resemble" their American counterparts.
     I would even venture to extend this comparison: I believe
that Rubinshtein is not only about doggerel-like lines as
"vehicle for social emotion" (see, for example, the other catalog
included in Third Wave, "From Thursday to Friday" [Bob quotes "A
Little Nighttime Serenade"]).  I apologize for not being able to
present here, due to time constrains, a convincing proof of my
argument, but let me elaborate the parallel a little more.  I do
find some of Rubinshtein's texts ("Poiavlenie geroia" ["The
Appearance of the Hero"], "Vse dal'she i dal'she" ["Further and
Further On"] and others) to some extent "Perelmanian," while in
some of Bob's poems (here I would mention, in addition to
"China," "Holes in the Argument" and "Doggerel Overtaken by
Order") I see a mode present which is similar to that of some of
the writings of, say, Rubinshtein or Druk.
     A few words about Third Wave.  Producing an anthology of the
new Russian poetry in English is a most praiseworthy idea.  I
believe, however, that the "pancake" offered by this book is much
too "lumpy."  To my knowledge, another such anthology is being
prepared for publication (as far as I can understand, completely
independently from Third Wave).  I hope that it avoids some of
Third Wave's drawbacks (although that could be problematic, too:
the project is "marred" by the involvement of Yevtushenko as a
co-editor).
     First, why Third Wave? The title is misleading, because the
term "third wave" is customarily applied to the culture of the
Russian emigration of the Brezhnev years (Joseph [or Iosif, but,
for heavens sake, not "Josef," as it is in the introduction to
Third Wave] Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov, Vasily Aksenov, Sergei
Dovlatov, Lev Losev, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Yuz Aleshkovsky, etc.).  In
fact, a collection of essays entitled exactly The Third Wave and
devoted to these and other writers of that generation was
recently published in this country.  If anything, the emergence
on the literary scene of the generation represented in the
anthology in question is posterior to "third wave."  (Besides,
virtually all of the poets represented in the anthology did not
emigrate from the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era.)
     Second, the choice of poems is sometimes surprising
(although perhaps it is not the editors' fault), and omissions of
certain poets (Igor' Irten'ev, Evgenii Bunimovich, Aleksandr
Levin and Mikhail Sukhotin to mention just a few) are hard to
explain (as well as perhaps the inclusion of some of the others).
Most importantly, I think that in this particular case the fact
that the original texts are not printed together with the
translations is especially unpardonable: the Russian publications
of these poems are dispersed between various official and
underground journals, almanacs, collections, etc.; there does not
yet exist a single representative anthology of the writings of
this generation in their original language.  This is even more
true when one considers the fact that some of the translations of
these poems, in which the play with linguistic and cultural codes
is one of the most relevant elements of construction, are not
entirely reliable; in my opinion, Vladimir Druk was particularly
unlucky in this respect, and I could list dozens of other
instances where I disagree with the translations offered.  It
would be unfair, though, not to add at this point that some of
the translations, for example those by Michael Palmer, are
excellent.
     One of the most problematic parts of Third Wave is the
introduction by Parshchikov and Wachtell.  Some of their
assertions simply run counter to historical facts.  (They claim,
for example, that Mayakovsky and Blok were "unpublishable in the
USSR between 1934 and the late 1950s" while these two have been
part even of the secondary school curriculum.)  The most
questionable, though, is the pseudo-Bakhtinian dichotomizing
division to which I referred earlier; the mere reading of the
works by the "monological" and "pluralistic" poets (to call
postmodern poetry "monological" hardly makes sense to begin with)
unsettles it completely. And do we really have, in our postmodern
age, to be fed explanations in terms of binary oppositions?
Thus the anthology is framed by two highly idiosyncratic texts
(the introduction and Epstein's afterword), abounding in various
undercurrents evident to the reader familiar with the poetry in
question, which may serve only as an element of confusion (the
way they confused, I believe, Marjorie Perloff).
     Finally, Third Wave is not, as it claims to be, the first
anthology of new Russian poetry to be published in English. It
was preceded by The Poetry of Perestroika, ed. Peter Mortimer and
S.J. Litherland, published in Britain two years ago.   A note
about the possibility of homologies between the cultural
phenomena in the US and in the former USSR. One should talk, I
believe, not about the homology of movements, but about a number
of similarities, certain shared aspects of the postmodern
cultural condition.   As far movements go, Russian conceptualism
is the only actual movement among the classificatory terms we are
offered in Third Wave (there isn't a "metarealist movement" or
school, etc.). This movement spans across genres: visual arts
(including happenings and performances, and through them,
avant-garde theater); poetry; prose; most recently -- film.
Together with the conceptualists, under the same cover (and
within the same "umbrella" groups, such as the Moscow Club
"Poetry" [Moskovskii klub "Poeziia"], which are highly
heterogeneous), one finds poets whose writing is much more
hermetic and esoteric, whose writing practice is to a great
extent conditioned by the situation of a narrow circle; in some
bizarre way they resurrect the paradigm of poetry's existence in
medieval Europe before printing -- poetry circulating within a
limited circle of friends and patrons.
     Emerging from underground in the second half of the 1980s,
these heterogeneous literary groups developed differently. Some
came into the foreground of the cultural scene, gaining attention
of the critics and the media, etc.; some remained "widely known
in narrow circles."  It is really sad, though, that sometimes
these circles are much too narrow; and in this respect I
especially welcome the happy event of the present symposium which
breaks through the barriers of these narrow circles. Once again,
I believe that the new Russian poetry is fascinatingly rich and
diverse, just like the entire culture of the Soviet postmodern.
We need more events like this one to open it up to intellectual
communities across the globe so that it achieves the recognition
it deserves.

                              Sincerely,

                              Vitaly Chernetsky

Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 07:42:00 GMT
From:         Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Vitaly Chernetsky's commentary

Dear Colleagues, I just read Vitaly Chernetsky's comments on THE
THIRD WAVE and want to say I appreciate them very much.  I myself
had wondered about the title, the lack of bilingual texts, and
some of the translations.  I could not judge the omissions.  I
also had reservations about the monologic/dialogic dichotomy that
Andrei and Andy Wachtel sketched out. Still, I think we should be
grateful for THIRD WAVE as a first stab at the problem.  The
difficulty, when material is so new, is that translations will
vary greatly in quality, that the editing will be less than
meticulous, and that Introductions and Afterwords may be
misleading.  On the other hand, Andrew Wachtel, working with
Alexei Parschikov, was willing to take on the project and to see
it through and, given time constraints, translation problems, and
availability of materials, I think it was useful. Clearly, it
will take some time before we get the kind of anthology we want
and, even then, what anthology, even of our own poetry, is ever
ideal, ever comprehensive?  Increasingly, U.S. publishers are
reluctant to print the original language when they bring out
translations; I know Ron Padgett had to fight to get the French
into his beautiful edition of Blaise Cendrars's poetry--and then
only in the back of the book!

The real problem THE THIRD WAVE has faced--and I don't know how
this  will be resolved--is that unfortunately now that the Soviet
Union is no more Americans have become much less interested in
the "new new poetry," have lost the thrill of coming into contact
with "forbidden" perestroika poetry.  Now Russian poetry is just
one more foreign poetry and increasingly, U.S. readers seem not
to care too much about poetry in other languages.  So what we
need to do is keep up the momentum initiated by THIRD WAVE, even
if the anthology is flawed.  This symposium and the help people
like Chernetsky have given is a step in the right direction.  And
I look forward to that next anthology he talks about.

Best wishes, Marjorie Perloff

September 25, 2013

From Phosphor

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

St. Petersburg, Russia
atd@HM.SPB.SU

Habits of mind result from a redistribution of the places on which the eyes fall. Yes, I’m probably right about this. What I’m thinking about at this particular moment allows me to assume so. A rusty rat crossing the street. A soft, interminable twilight, and above it the night lights burning. The room in which we lived was almost eighteen meters long. In the mornings, on streets billowing steam, I went around the corner, bare foot but for sandals, to drink a cup of hot milk and eat cheese pastry. Liteiny Prospekt was blinding. I shuffled along in unbuckled sandals. Amid mocking seagulls and love cries. Through a courtyard to the Fontanka, passing the library, toward the circus, the bridge. This is about many things. It’s about emigration. About T.S. Eliot and Turgenev. But what are you thinking about? What did or what does your life consist of? I like your question. In the kitchen in a glass jar she kept demons (warring with cockroaches) which she fed with poppyseeds. Your question comes at absolutely the right moment, although it makes me slightly nauseous, the way roses or moldy dolls might–vertigo. By evening my skin stung from the sun. It happened the first time on an anthill. They rushed frantically toward the river. As if through a magnifying glass. In the future, if he’s to recount a couple of the plots that interest him (let’s suppose), he will have to get rid of her. But of whom, one wants to know! History? Geometry? Mental habits? One of these plots begins with a murder.

A yellow-edged photograph. Beads of laughter on his glasses, on the windshield. Thought is a system, producing systematic eliminations. At the same time, a question arises–as to whether or not it is right to assume, having left one’s message on the answering machine, that the resulting communication will be from a living person. “I’m not home,” for example, “I can’t come to the phone now,” or, “You have reached so-and-so,” etc. This question, however, despite its apparent silliness, is essentially theological, since it inevitably touches on the question of the life force, the soul, its migrations, and the places it inhabits, suggesting “voices of existence,” too, not to mention routine speculation as to presence and absence. And indeed, if my voice reaches your ear across a particular stretch of time (or period of endurance–the experience being in what remains), it presupposes a “distance,” since you are never I. Does my voice, even being inside me, a single being–does my voice reach you, that is, my essential “I” (our breathing is an out-terance, a crazy moment dangling between “out” and utterance), which does exist, but not for you, in your complete acceptance of flickering, glittering matter, shrouded in the most delicate rustle of awakening that flows from your pursuing vision, where the present has already existed? Where do our identifyings take place? A vibration of the surrounding atmosphere–microwinds, a mystical notebook. And “who” or “what”? Moreover, the people involved in a narrative, in other words the characters, don’t in themselves represent much of anything, except in the case of a woman who takes an important role in the action (and there is such a portrait: a familiarly shaped mouth, wide lips, a habit of adjusting the shoulders of her dress, etc.–and another, intimate portrait, more transparent: her brownish pubic hair cut short, an imponderable scar on her waist, wide pale aureoles around her nipples, the trace of a tattoo between them), whose son died a few years ago. There is some thought that he didn’t “simply die” but that he was killed near Kandahar not far from Thebes, but instead of this romantic invention most people prefer the truth, namely that he was hanged on the 14th of May in the assembly hall of his school by his classmates, using a silk cord from the white curtain; and possibly, due to unforeseeable circumstances, one of them has some notion concerning the silk cocoon of the window and a tedious description of a flight across the Atlantic, abounding in similes and necessary to the progress of future events.

One would have to be an idiot to speak of a “sequel” to the new. This is impossible to explain to artists. It’s utterly impossible even to explain it to the man who sits rubbing the crystal eyes of the fish swallowed into the museum’s lottery drum. Ball lightning, rocking, froze over my grandfather’s glass of vodka and after a few moments crept in through the window, where my grandmother, because of her nearsightedness, took it for one of the demons living in the kitchen in her glass jar which had somehow slipped past the cockroach patrols. The terra-cotta colored morocco leather of the book bindings, the faded imprint embossing the leather, the copper coolness of the sextant, the mother-of-pearl sheen of blackened silver inlaying the yellow bone paper knife–that day is no different from yesterday. There are two types of suicide (of course, it’s possible there are more). First, when your will and the world’s desires meet and you are shattered while attempting to enclose them in your own existence–you become too strong, sturdy, bulky, heavy–and I don’t pity you–like a porcelain Christmas bird. Second, when you suddenly find yourself in a realm of deafness, where nothing reflects anything else and where for a while a terrifying image of a false world is erected: what surrounds you surrounds you, fingers flowing into the porous substance of matter, every second thought finding uniquely correct solutions. No questions exist. You are born, you die, you eat, you explain the essence of phenomena, enumerating all of them. Or you don’t enumerate them. In which case, I don’t pity you.

What, one asks, is there to pity? Probably some contradiction between “desire” and “wish.” The more intense the desire, the stronger the non-wishing. A person, realizing this, dedicates himself to Demeter. The morning flowed smoothly, like a comparison slowly unfolding into similarities. And this was all in the course of things. What is this “there are no senses”?….

No? Could it possibly be “no”? But they waved sunflowers after us, which had turned gold like their eyes, withered by grief and yet also by consciousness of the happiness which had befallen them; or rather, of course, first by one and then by the other; but they simply hadn’t managed to figure out that they had been happier in other times when other models of happiness had been offered them. But we already know how the smoothly flowing morning takes a bend toward the nightingale darkness, when night, snow white as a sable, nurtures the phosphorous in a half-sphere of a porcelain cup. And to that extent we know the figure of fate and the theory of catastrophes, painstakingly illustrated by the dazzling pulse of a system which upsets all calculations as to how they’ll behave–in the same way, gusts of wind strike one’s face with the finest sands and with crackling leaves when the street is parched with yellow like a throat sifting the granular air. A mothy murk. I suggest we take the following walk. Beginning on our street, we’ll cross the intersection at the point where the huge shadow of a nut is falling on the sidewalk, its sound momentarily making voices completely unintelligible; then we’ll proceed straight ahead toward the school where after all I happen to have studied and from which I was expelled as from so many others, although I suppose it’s inappropriate to mention this. Then we’ll go through a sparse grove of mulberry trees and barren apple trees and come to the chemical plant’s sedimentation tanks, incredible in their magnitude, always astounding both his and my (that is, to put it another way, your and my) imagination–to the cyclops-like squares and rectangles formed by the embankments, which were formed in prehistoric times by bulldozers and are, as always, filled in some places with milky nacreous slush and in others with a substance startling in the beauty of its unearthly color, an “electric,” azure emerald threaded with some kind of fibrous, brass gold spasm, shot in some places with jasper blazing up at the very moment you look away and streaked like rainbowed spots of oil in the sun, and in yet others with a hellish red plasma, and all this in one sense forms a single field as far as the forsaken shooting range: in its terrifying flatness, a mirror, in whose zenith is placed the formula for the inversion of light. It would be naive, in light of this field, to think about your brother’s bones, brittle, whittled like a wafted message, or about your sister’s hair. The girl here doesn’t comb her braids, the geese don’t honk, our meeting here is set for noon. And further on we’ll come to the shooting range, empty cartridge cases, willows. In a two hour walk among the hunted wormwoods there’s much else to be found. A map of poetry. The broken mirrors of the foliage. The broken mirrors of number. Tendrils of conclusion. The “humane” is washed from a body endowed with feelings–not one single reflection falls on the object. On an uninhabited island an object replaces memory as that which proceeds toward the future. A decision has been made. Torquato Tasso’s first visit to Don Carlos took place at the end of the 80s, the second at the beginning of the 90s. It’s worth noting that comment regarding a collaborative writing of madrigals, and not only such poems as they both wrote about the prince but also about his wife, including stanzas on his first wife’s death. Hounded by madness, Tasso dashes from one courtyard to another. The autumn weather remains dry. Near Kherson the stubble is burning. The first visit. Some correspondence. A second visit.

The musicians–one must give them their due–were quite good. But Monteverdi! Why, he began composing when he was fifteen…. That time whose splinters resemble broken mirrors of foliage has never come.

September 25, 2013
Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov
Barrett Watten

University of California, San Diego

While it has often been said that since the purported “fall of communism” the Soviet Union has become in reality a collection of Third World countries with nuclear weapons and a subway system, this is an untruth. It is the “Second World”–and what is that?

(Watten, in Davidson, 23)

Subjectivity is not the basis for being a Russian person. . . . “Protestants,” said Arkadii, “go to church to mail a letter to God, the church, it’s like a post office. The Orthodox church–the building is not symbolic–it is considered to be the real body of God, and Orthodox people too are God because they are together here, not alone, and speaking, by the way, has nothing to do with it.”

(Hejinian, in ibid., 34-35)

The break-up of official culture, even the “official/unofficial” dialectic that was a part of it, in the Soviet Union led to aesthetic developments characterized by an intense, utopian, and metaphysically speculative subjectivity that I am going to call “post-Soviet” even if it had its origins in earlier periods. Beginning in the 1960s with the optimistic horizons prior to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, extending through the Brezhnev “era of stagnation” of the 1970s with its fully articulated counterculture, through the opening to the West and the influence of emigration in the 1980s, a series of these developments anticipate their reception as “postmodern culture” in the West. Identifying these “post-Soviet” developments with postmodernism would be to misunderstand them, however; as poet Dmitrii Prigov has said of the Moscow conceptual art of the 1970s, “When [Western conceptualism] entered our part of the world, [it] discovered the total absence of any idea of the object and its inherent qualities or of any hint whatsoever of fetishism” (12). The subsequent valorization of Andy Warhol would have has yet-to-be-determined (though not unimaginable) consequences; so the “Women Admirers of Jeff Koons Club” I encountered in Leningrad in 1989 would be the sign of an emerging feminism as much as an acceptance of the Reagan-era consumerism of Koons’s work. Even the culture of Russian modernism, refracted through Western connoisseurship, has been reinter- preted in the new post-Soviet context in a way discontinuous with its historical origins. In order to understand these developments as not simply the colonization of Western postmodernism, it will be necessary to develop models for Second World discourses of subjectivity. A prospective conclusion is that contemporary post-Soviet culture, once it has expanded to integrate both unofficial and international influences, does not simply mean an uncritical embrace of Western postmodernism but reveals a post-Soviet “subjectivity” that is not simply reducible to the various national identities now contesting the ground of the former Soviet state. I see aspects of this subjectivity in Moscow conceptual art, originating in the 1970s and producing internationally recognized figures such as Komar and Melamid, Erik Bulatov, and Ilya Kabakov, and in the 1980s “meta” literature from Moscow and Leningrad, now being translated in the West, exemplified by poets Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexei Parshchikov, Ilya Kutik, and Nadezhda Kondakova.

A Metapoetics of Memory

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s poetry, it was said, “is unlike anything else being written in the Soviet Union today” (Molnar, 7), and direct observation bears this out. At the Leningrad “Summer School” of 1989, Dragomoshchenko was unique in abandoning the (often complex) metrical forms and performative theatricality that, however inflected by skewed and difficult sound patterns and semantics, look back to a precedent “classical tradition . . . as in the Acmeism of Akhmatova or early Mandelstam, [which] stood for heroically distanced emotion and a European cultural intertext” but which often led to poetic norms reduced to “ruthless metricality and relentless rhyming” (Molnar, 10). Dragomoshchenko read his poems as if they were written texts rather than oral presentations of cultural memory embodied in the poet as much as in the poet’s rhymes–unlike Ivan Zhdanov, who declaimed the highly wrought language of his richly textured and difficult lyrics as if ab eterno, directly from memory, to great effect. One listener afterward complained to Dragomoshchenko, “What you are doing isn’t poetry”–because it lacked the generic markers by which poetry had been set apart, in ways directly related to Osip Mandelstam’s memorization and embodiment of his poetry as a standard of truth set against ideological lies. While equally based in an internalized self-consciousness, Dragomoshchenko’s poetry rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of tradition’s modernist authority–not simply for anti-authoritarian motives but to create a new poetics that challenges conventional meaning and its entailments of common knowledge. It would be hard to underestimate the radical effect of this break with the overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standards for Russian verse–and the resulting demand it conveys for a redefinition of collective memory and objective truth.

A poetics of collective memory in opposition to official history (often meeting at a middle ground in official/unofficial poets such as Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina) is one of the implicit goals of Russian modernism–the poet (seen as survivor) becomes a living embodiment of memory. But in Dragomoshchchenko’s poem “Nasturtium as Reality,” memory is fractured and refigured by means of a relentless epistemological critique toward a more complicated horizon. The poem begins by essaying “An attempt / to describe an isolated object / determined by the anticipation of the resulting whole– / by a glance over someone else’s shoulder” (93). Spatial and temporal vectors specify the dynamics of this attempt: the poem predicates a temporal series on a “missing X” that precedes it, presumably the nasturtium but also a grammatical “there exists.” This predicative address likewise introduces the “nasturtium” in the second stanza as parallel and equivalent to the “attempt”–with both to be resolved in the “resulting whole” that will make either possible. Equally determining, however, is the opacity of the “glance over someone else’s shoulder”–that which interferes with vision equally motivates it. The nasturtium is seen as if a window were both transparent and opaque, not to the nasturtium but to itself–the “window” is an opaque analogy to transparent language through which a nasturtium normally would be seen: “A nasturtium composed / of holes in the rain-spotted window–to itself / it’s `in front,’ // to me, `behind.’” This “rain-spotted window” is the language of the poem, through whose constructed elisions occurs the possibility of description; on the surface of language, description is “in front,” though from the point of view of subjectivity in the poem the nasturtium is “behind” language (from an easier perspective, of course, “in front” and “behind” mean the nasturtium’s relation to the window). Where a window, like description, is conventionally transparent, here it is a shattered opacity of perspectives, interfering with and determining the gaze much like “someone else,” that leads to grounds of certainty and belief posed grammatically as a question: “Whose property is the gleaming / tremor / of compressed disclosure / in the opening of double-edged prepositions / in / a folded plane / of transparency which strikes the window pane?” Anything but transparently, we begin to see the nasturtium as if in double-edged language that predicts a “resulting whole” of description preceded by “an isolated object.” In the ensuing working through of the poem, memory is displaced and refigured in the spaces opened up by such knowledge through similar means; the poem is a construction of memory and knowledge between a past and a future it will formally embody. Futurity will have accounted for the nasturtium that preceded the poem, making possible the “compressed disclosure” of an intensely sub- jective continuity of memory and perception taking place in and of its language.

In stages of approach, the poem sharpens the edges of prospective meaning figured in the nasturtium, often defining the space where it would exist by negation, in terms of its absence from other spaces: “A sign, inverted– not mirror, not childhood. // (A version: this night shattered apart / by the rays of the dragonflies’ concise deep blue / drawing noon into a knot of blinding / foam” (94). In this way, the poem typically shifts “thematic” address to noncontiguous objects of a fractured nature such as this dragonfly (later a specific tree, a flight of “swifts”). Occasional eruptions of what V. N. Voloshinov would have called ideological speech (“A sign sweats over the doorway: `Voltaire has been killed. Call me immediate- ly”) likewise shift the poem away from its “object,” but they cannot detract from its expanding subjective truth: “the knowledge, which belongs to me, / absorbs it cautiously, tying it / to innumerable capillary nets: / the nasturtium–it is a section of the neuron / string” (96). This knowledge is presented not as a report to some transcendent observer–a comparison with Marianne Moore’s aesthetics of natural grandeur in “An Octopus” would fail at this point–but through the substance of language produced from a variety of sites. So shifts away from the ostensible subject of the poem are “only a continuation / within the ends’ proximity” (97); the poem expands to include fragments of dialogue, self-reference (“Arkadii / Trofimovitch Drago- moshchenko describes / a nasturtium, inserts it in his head”; 99), along with its observation of spatial and temporal discontinuities. An increasing axis of meta-commentary is created through the language of the poem by means of such semantic shifts: “The nasturtium / and anticipation rainy as the window and wind- / ow behind wind- / ow / (he in it, it in him) / like meanings smashing each other / [I don’t say, metaphor . . .] / drawn / by emptiness / one of the distinct details–“; 100). Through its insistent reduction of similarity to contiguity– description turning to language–poetry becomes virtually a kind of physics (“The mechanism / of the keys, extracting sound, hovering over / its description // in the ear, // protracted with reverberation into the now”) which depends, for its assertion of palpable reality, on a continual undermining of language by itself (“When? Where? / Me? Vertigo conceives / `things’”; 101). In this expanding horizon of meaning, sense is made “only / through another / (multiplication tables, game boards, needles, a logarithmic / bird,” i.e., anything presentable in language, “and the point isn’t which kind” (103). The poem oscillates between intensely subjective states and objective properties of description, attempting both in either’s negation: “I contemplated the truth behind events listening to the vivid- ness / of the erased words / ready to expound on the defects of precision” to become definitive of poet’s self-canceling voice: “And here in the 41st year of life / A pampered fool, whose speech continually / misses the point” (106). “The Nasturtium” is an account of subjectivity seen through such intensities of language: “I follow from burst to burst, from explosion to explosion, / faces, like magnesium petals floating by, which permit those who remain a misprint in memory / to be recognized” (108), but it makes no assump- tions about a continuity of nature behind the poem as the basis for these effects. Rather, the poem moves directly from the negated description of objective reality to expanded systems of meaning encompassing it: “Conjecture is simple– / the nasturtium is not /// necessary. It is composed from the exceptional exactness / of language / commanding the thing–`to be’ / and the rejection of understanding” (110-11). The poem locates the objective world by placing the language of description under erasure, opening language to many languages and in this way deter- mining what its relation to nature is going to be: “The nasturtium–it is the undiminished procession / of forms, the geological chorus of voices crawling, / shouting, disclosing each other” (112).

It is through this clash of languages tending toward future objectivity that a space for refigured subjectivity, seen in purely material strands of memory, can be located. In that futurity is connected here to a poetics of many languages, it is important that Dragomoshchenko is by birth Ukrainian (born in postwar occupied Potsdam, raised in multilingual environs of Vilnitsa, now living in St. Petersburg), although he writes in Russian. He has, in other poems, shifted to Ukrainian as poetic counterpoint specifically to bring up a kind of archaic subtext under the surface of ordinary language, thus allying his epistemological concerns with those of cultural memory. In “The Nasturtium,” such archaic subtexts appear in two autobiographical narratives that emerge out of its nonnarrative continuum. In one such vignette, a typically cinematic moment of self-knowledge, “tossing her skirt on the broken bureau / with wood dust in her hair / a neighbor girl, spreading her legs / puts your hand where it is hottest” (103)–which leads, not quite as typically, to anxious spasms of linguistic cross-cutting. It is as if the eruption of the feminine demands a release of poetic authority, as it does in the next section in a more measured way where an account of the death of a woman close to the poet, again in and of language, locates another range for the outer horizons of the poem: “and all the more unbearable the meaning of `her’ ripened in you / while the quiet work went on revealing / thoughts / (you, her) from the sheath of feminine pain / the silent symmetry crumbling in the immense proximity of the end” (105). In this way “the meaning of `her’” aligns with both memory and objectivity; while there is a difficult cultural truth in this admission of women only at the extremes of authorizing self-knowledge, at least the Russian poetic convention of transcendent nature (think of waving fields of grain as equivalent to verse in a Sovkino documentary of Yevtushenko) is being broken down in its assumptions.

This location of a poetics in a refiguring of memory through the limits of objectivity aligns Dragomoshchenko’s work with related projects in post-1960s Soviet culture. So the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, a prior reference point for the semantically shifting world of Dragomoshchenko’s work, crop up in his recent article on poetic subjectivity. Making a figure for collective knowledge, Dragomoshchenko says that the poet may return, like a blind bee, to a “hive” of understanding, but there is no hive. It disappears at the very moment when understanding comes close to being embodied in itself and its “things,” which to all appearances is really the “hive.” We wander through a civilization of destroyed metaphors: road, home, language, a man on a bicycle, embraces, Tarkovsky’s films, moisture, “I,” memories, history, and so forth. (“I(s),” 130)For Dragomoshchenko, “the problem of subjectivization is tautological,” fractally reproduced in the dispersion and refiguring of a collective center, “the hive,” in culture’s unreified objects. Wandering through this “civilization of destroyed metaphors,” one can only figure the holistic tenor from its dispersed vehicles. Such a demetaphorization occurs similarly in a film such as Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (by means of techniques intended as the opposite of Eisenstein’s constructed film metaphors). Nonnarrative, intuitive sequences displace memory, continuity, futurity onto a fragmented world of objects comprising several registers of image. In one, the burning house in the countryside to which mother and son have been removed during the war stands as mnemonic placeholder for the future return of the father that is always to come (there is a question for the viewer if it “really” takes place). In another, the multiple, sidelong, disjunct views down corridors of the state publishing house where the mother worked in the 1930s as proofreader enacts the moment where the collective “hive” dissolves into “things”; millennial horizons become fragments of presence, as in the hinted propaganda poster barely glimpsed on the way to other rooms. Finally, the insertion of documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War argues the film’s subjectivity against the intrusiveness of represented history, which takes on memorial value as loss. Images in Dragomoshchenko have similar organizing dynamics; so “the nasturtium bearing fire” which closes Dragomoshchenko’s poem stands in place of memory’s anticipated return; the overlapping and mutually contradictory frames of descriptive language dissolve certainty into isolated moments; and the interruptions of narrative displace subjectivity toward expanded horizons. Closure–the father’s return or the nasturtium as realized object–is distributed through these registers as partial resolution.

The relation between empirical reality and a deferred future that exceeds nature but in terms of which it can only be known (figured here in the form of the poem) is also a central theme in recent discussions in Soviet (and post-Soviet) science. The opening invocation of our “Summer School” was to “be scientific,” but what followed led rapidly away from any question of empirical verification toward a prospective, metaphysical hyperspace in which, for example, “futurist art [like that of Khlebnikov’s post-Euclidean mathematics of world correspondence] has its own dominant in consciousness” (Watten, in Davidson, 43). So a recent article by Moscow philologist Mikhail Dziubenko describes a scientific project that would unite the problem of “new meaning” in poetry and art with an idiosyncratic branch of Soviet science known as the “Linguistics of Altered States of Consciousness”–a quest for a new approach to method characteristic of a wide range of Soviet science. For Dziubenko, “At deep levels of consciousness (which acquire primary meaning in the creative process) the ability to penetrate into the logic of other languages is established. Artistic creativity, then, involves a break- through into another language, which uses the character- istics and lacunae of the original” (27). Such a language, in addition, is based in material, sensed reality, but only for its future potential:

We must understand that there is only one linguistic universum, uniting all world languages in the massive entity of their historical development and functional applications. This universum is not a scientific abstraction. It is manifested concretely, on the lowest, phonetic level, in naming, where moreover language differentiations do not play any definitive role, and on the highest, grammatical-syntactic level, in art, which is only possible by virtue of the existence of different languages and which is itself an unconscious borrowing of foreign language structures.(29-30)

Here, “the knowledge of one language is knowledge of all languages,” leading to a research program in which “there is no doubt that a Persian specialist could contribute a great deal to the study of Khlebnikov’s works” (30-31). Creativity expands language into a utopian “linguistic universum” in a romantic philology that recalls Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fantasy of whole nations thinking in each of their various languages. There are several points to this excursus into late-Soviet discussions of scientific method: the first is that creativity is thought to have ontological implications; the second is that as material reality, crea- tive language extends, “through characteristics and lacunae,” into a greater reality that contains it; and a third would be that, structuring language in the variety of its altered states as well as being structured by it, subjectivity is not permitted the transcendent distance of the observer but instead experiences loss due to an expanded suprasubjectivity whenever the grounds for language (altered states, presumably) historically change. So the impact of the creative on scientific method is to open a space of loss of certainty that can then be aligned with a need for a reconstituted memory–as it is for Dragomoshchenko. “Nasturtium as Reality” is not only a reconstitution of lyric subjectivity but a parallel text to post-Soviet considerations of collective memory and empirical truth. Clearly “an authoritarian complex” involving several strands in Soviet culture–lyric voice, embodied memory, and scientific objectivity–is being dismantled as the occasion of poetic address.

The Fall of Soviet Man

The theatricality of Ilya Kabakov’s conceptual albums, paintings, and installations is at a polar remove from Dragomoshchenko’s expansive interiority. Ten Characters, a series of installations with accompanying narratives published as a book of the same name based on the theme of the kommunalka or communal apartment, was presented by Kabakov at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, in 1988-89. These projects had been under development since at least the early 1980s, but one imagines their everyday materials to have been collected, and various components worked on, over the preceding decade. Installation itself, understood as one of the forms by which traditional genres such as painting and sculpture have become destabilized in postmodernism, takes on a culturally hybrid value in Kabakov’s work as most of what was seen in the active Soviet underground of the 1970s was itself “installed” in some nongallery setting such as an apartment or open-air happening; the bulldozer art exhibition of the late Brezhnev era in this sense could be the outer social horizon for the form. The genre continued in Moscow conceptual art in what has been called “Aptart,” which was characterized as uniting a social scale of presentation based in everyday life with a diverse and often aggressively dissonant range of issues, materials, and strategies. This work seems more a cultural breeding ground for new ideas than a finished product, while Kabakov’s installations have all the finish and framing of the most professional work in the genre as it has developed as a component of museum programs over the last fifteen years in the West–witness his inclusion in the recent Dislocations show at the Museum of Modern Art. It would be interesting to chart Kabakov’s movement from Soviet oppositional scale to that of Western postmodernism; this could be read, thematically, in his work as a movement from the simultaneously millennial and dystopian horizons of the Soviet context through to another kind of transcendence implied in Kabakov’s showing, outside the Soviet Union, works that depict its deepest, most interior reality.

Subjectivity in Kabakov, rather than being read along some razor’s edge of language in nonnarrative forms addressed to metaphysical horizons, is narratively defined in the life histories of disjunct, created personae configured around the communal apartment seen from a transcendent perspective (even if it is still linked to the metaphysical as an enabling point of reference for the work). Transcendence is really the only option for a social reality modeled on such living arrangements, which, from the Revolution through the Khrushchev housing boom and into the present, typically crammed the urban working class into multi-family dwellings, often one family per room, where everyone shared the collective amenities and, according to Kabakov, life was open-ended verbal abuse. Given this premise, Kabakov has created a world of discontinuous, extreme personality types to be imagined as somehow, impossibly, sharing the same communal space while inventing wildly adventurous behaviors and systems of belief to accommodate themselves to their world. The short narrative accounts that accompany Kabakov’s meticulously detailed physical installations are anything but anecdotal; rather, these narratives form a template through which the realities of Soviet systems of belief can be represented as they would be experienced in everyday life (or byt, a central term in Kabakov’s work, and one that evinces from many post-Soviets an unutterable horror: “Our everyday life, you cannot imagine how boring it is!” once remarked poet Alexei Parshchikov). There is a system of interlocking, mutually supporting belief systems in Kabakov’s byt, a structuring intersubjectivity that gives an accurate value to the represented world of May Day parades, the Moscow Metro, Soviet theme parks outside. “The kommunalka presents a certain collective image, in which all the ill-assortedness and multileveledness of our reality is concentrated and vividly revealed” for Kabakov (Tupitsyn, 50), a reality figured as an “autonomous linguistic organism,” “an extended childhood,” “a repressive sea of words,” “the madhouse,” and so on (51-54). Alternatives emerge: one can go into oneself (“Some of the inhabitants of the communal apartment lead a mysterious, even secretive existence”; Kabakov, 52) or “leap out of oneself,” as Kabakov himself says he did (“While formally I haven’t ceased to live inside myself, I observe what happens from repeatedly shifting positions”; Tupitsyn, 55). Beyond either possibility, “some powerful, lofty, and faraway sound is clearly audible. A higher voice” (54) for both artist and communal residents. Listening to the voice of the “beyond” will be one of the organizing metaphors of Kabakov’s project–it is simultaneously the voice of collective life and the position of transcendence from which the komunalka‘s voices can be heard.

So in “The Man Who Flew into His Picture,” subjectivity is drawn as if by a magnet to a negating white space, a ground for pure projection: “He sees before him an enormous, endless ocean of light, and at that moment he merges with the little, plain figure that he had drawn.” At this moment of self-undoing, however, “he comes to the conclusion that he needs some third person, some sort of witness [to be] present to watch him `from the side’” (7). Such a witness is given embodiment as merely the case of delusions in the next room, where “The Man Who Collects the Opinions of Others,” “standing behind the door, immediately writes down in his notebook everything which is said, no matter what” (9). This quest for objectivity yields only another structured fantasy:

According to his view, opinions are arranged in circles. Beginning at any point, they then move centrifugally and as they move away from the centre they meet "opinions" moving from other centres. These waves are superimposed, one on top of another; according to him, the entire intellectual world is a gigantic network, a lattice of similar dynamic intersections of these waves. He compared all this to the surface of a lake, where 10-20 stones are randomly and uninterruptedly thrown all at once. (9)

“In talking about this, it was as though my neighbour actually saw these magical, shining circles” (10); Kabakov visualizes them likewise in his installation of tidy mock-ups of the character’s notebook pages arranged around the “objects” that gave rise to the “opinion waves.” While this is clearly high satire of venerable Russian literary pedigree, there is an identification with these delusional modes of organizing reality that makes Kabakov’s project unlike the realist mode of describing the subject positions of, say, the flophouse in Gorky’s The Lower Depth (which Kabakov cites in an interview). The meticulous details of Kabakov’s miniature mock-up and full-scale realization of the scene from “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment” reveal a complicity with monumental obsessiveness, as do his “characters’” collections of objects and albums of kitsch postcards. It is Kabakov himself who assembled these Soviet versions of Trivial Pursuit, reframing his activities through the various personae. In each of these works, the space of culture and everyday life is seen as the opposite of the transcendental perspective and monumental organization of Soviet society’s official self-presentation (given the dominant red of numerous cheap posters covering the walls). The explosion that rips a hole in the top floor of the communal apartment, sending its resident into orbit, creates a negative space from Soviet monumentalism, while the orbits of Yuri Gagarin and followers ironically mimed here stand for state-sponsored transcendence purveyed to the masses at large. The desire to substitute material reality for ideological abstraction created this negative space: “I asked him why there were metal bands attached to the model and leading upward from his future flight” (13). Such kitsch futurism–the mechanical predictability of “We are Going to Communism”–seems to have created, in this char- acter, a highly developed metaphysics to explain how it will be:

He imagined the entire Universe to be permeated by huge sheets of energy which "lead upwards somewhere." These gigantic upward streams he called "petals." . . . The Earth together with the sun periodically crosses through one of these enormous "petals." If you knew this precise moment, then you could jump from the orbit of the Earth onto this "petal," i.e., you could enter, join this powerful stream and be whirled upwards with it.

Fabricating a contraption made of rubber “extension wires” and explosive charges, the resident realizes his objective and blasts into orbit, thus creating a monumental gap in the explanatory fabric of everyday life which others rationalize in a characteristic way: “Maybe he really did fly away, that sort of thing happens.” In the ideological space vacated by monumental trajectories and transcendent goals one can see a cultural breeding ground for rumors, speculations, and theologies of all sorts.

Such systems of belief, orbiting as it were around a vacant belief, are made equivalent, in yet another irony, to the material culture that was supposed to provide them with normative expectations. So a metaphorized collecting, a simple accumulation of bits and pieces of culture, becomes the activity of the artist; material reality replaces a more conventionally redemptive collective memory. In works like “The Short Man,” “The Collector,” “The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters,” and “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away,” Kabakov makes his art an inductive process adding up to indeterminate but compelling horizons that motivate his fractal characters. The “short man’s” project of accumulation and re-presenting cultural detritus in fold-out albums is a parodic version of realism seen as representing the world “in little”: “Everything that goes on in our communal kitchen, why, isn’t that a subject, it’s actually a ready-made novel!” (20); however, the only people who can stoop so low as even to read this little world are, like its author, little (as the poet Louis Zukofsky wrote, “Strabismus may be of interest to strabismics; those who see straight look away!”); others invited in to view the work merely step over it as an obstacle. The substratum of material culture, reinterpreted as past not present reality, initiates a process of individuation and recuperation in “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away”: “A simple feeling speaks about the value, the importance of everything. This feeling is familiar to everyone who has looked through or rearranged his accumulated papers: this is the memory associated with all the events connected with each of these papers” (44). So this character initiates a project of collecting, preserving, and labeling all the discarded items found in the kommunalka‘s hallway in order to recover this value: “An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials, and sacks. . . . They cry out about a past life, they preserve it” (45).

“The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters” continues this process of induction to uncover a principle of individuation through his subjects: “that even these variegated fragments belonged not to his single conscious- ness, his memory alone, but, as it were, to the most diverse and even separate minds, not connected with each other, rather strongly different from each other” (34), while “The Untalented Artist” modulates this effect of individuation through structures of the state that in fact produce it; the paradoxical success of his paintings (in the actual installation an excessively beautiful group of large-scale, ideologically inflected works by Kabakov) is described as based equally in the artist’s partly realized native talent and in the lacunae of official projects (various official notices and posters) he was commissioned to paint: “What re- sults is a dreadful mixture of hackwork, simple lack of skill, and bright flashes here and there of artistic premonitions and `illuminations’” (17)–a kind of suprasubjective intention. In “The Collector” a similar suprasubjective horizon looms as the dissociation of identity through collective culture proceeds; arrangements of numerous color postcards on state tourist and memorial themes become “enormous, complex pictorial works which are worthy of a very great professional talent” (31). Recombining disparate strands of the culture produces an effect of “the power of ORDER”; “This is the triumph of the victory of order over everything.” There is a paradox here, however; while it is the artist who in fact created this order by making his arrangements of cultural materials, the voice of order points beyond individuality: “It seemed to me that in some terrible way, some kind of, how shall I say it, idea of COMMUNALITY, was expressed in [the arrangements], that very same thing which surrounded us all in our common overcrowded apartment” (32). This drawing out of the collective voice is pursued in “The Composer Who Combined Music with Things and Images,” whose staged mass productions in the kommunalka hallway, like a miniature version of a Stalinist sports extravaganza, trades the sovereignty of the artist who arranges reality for a collective voice heard by all: “Gradually those who are reading the [arranged] texts begin to notice that beyond the sound of their voices is a faintly heard, special kind of sound” (27)–a transcendent moment reproducing, I would argue, an idea of communality.

So we have come full circle, from an obsessively material collocation and implicit satire on Soviet collective life to the question of higher, transcendent, metaphysical perspectives. In “The Rope,” a piece that serves as a comment on his “characters,” Kabakov essays the point at which materialism breaks off and spirituality begins: “So these empty ends of rope . . . represent the soul before and after `our’ life, and in the middle is depicted its life, so to speak, in its earthly segment” (48). Working out from these middles toward the open ends of the soul, Kabakov recuperates the multiple identities of his communal apartment in terms of a single, collective destiny–albeit otherworldly. His project here could not be less like George Perec’s description of multiple lives in the same building in La Vie mode d’emploi, where each life means a separate history, a different outcome rendered in the reified space of owned or rented individual dwellings. Kabakov, in his ironic rejection of Soviet culture, still maintains a totalizing attitude toward history–at the risk of a virtual nihilism in regard to the things of this world, an attitude necessary, it would seem, to maintain a totalizing coherence. In a short text on the status of the “beyond” in relation to material reality, Kabakov speaks of “emptiness” as conditions of his work: “First and foremost I would like to speak about a peculiar mold, a psychological condition of those people born and residing in emptiness . . . . Emptiness creates a peculiar atmosphere of stress, excitedness, strengthlessness, apathy, and causeless terror” (Ross, 55). In the negated space once occupied by a a transcendent, materialized state, there is now the inescapable horizon of a totalizing “stateness”:

The stateness in the topography of this place is that which belongs to an unseen impersonality, the element of space, in short all that serves as an embodiment of emptiness. . . . A metaphor comes closest of all to a definition of that stateness: the image of a wind blowing interminably alongside and between houses, blowing through everything by itself, an icy wind sowing cold and destruction. . . . What sort of goals does this wind, this stateness, set for itself, if they exist at all? These goals always bear in mind the mastery of the scope of all territory occupied by emptiness as a SINGLE WHOLE.(58)

From this single whole of Soviet reality it is but one step to a profound nihilism (and one that is more socially significant than simply the attitude of an artist): “Nothing results from anything, nothing is connected to anything, nothing means anything, everything hangs and vanishes in emptiness, is born off by the icy wind of emptiness” (59). These collective emptinesses interpret the nonexistent fullnesses, the pasts and futures at both ends of Kabakov’s individual, material rope.

Values for transcendence in the project would thus seem to refer importantly to two diverse registers: the this-worldly perspective of the artist-as-character who organizes reality in some compensatory way, and the other-worldly vision of the collective/individual subject, who would seem to have no other option than to await the dystopian millennium. Kabakov, in his position outside and beyond Soviet reality in commenting on his installation for the Museum of Modern Art, explicitly resolves these two versions of transcendence:

The installation as a genre is probably a way to give new correlations between old and familiar things. By entering an installation, these various phenomena reveal their dependence, their "separateness," but they may reveal as well their profound connection with each other, which was perhaps lost long ago, which they at some time had, and which they always needed. And particularly important is the restoration of that whole that had fallen into its parts [the separation of art from the "mystical"] I had spoken of.

The “mystical” union of restored parts within a formal whole would be one that Kabakov had induced from the ideological horizons of his characters but which, as artist working as it were “outside” the kommunalka, can realize in his chosen form. There is an explicit self-contradiction here; so when Kabakov says in an interview, “Upon discharge from the madhouse, I cease to exist. I exist only insofar as I am the resident of a kommunalka. I know no other self” (Tupitsky, 54), it is clear that his “outside” position as installation artist in the Museum of Modern Art, Kabakov’s position as quasi-Soviet emigre’ (he maintains studios in France and in Moscow), can only be another version of the transcendence strategized from within the confines of collective life. Re-sited within the museum’s horizon, however, this insistence on wholeness becomes reinterpreted as tragic separation and loss, as the Fall of Communism that so comforts the curatorial perspective of Dislocations:

Kabakov's reconstruction of the Tenants' Club of Moscow Housing Project No. 8 gives one a sense of the dreary mediocrity of Soviet society. . . . This unwelcome gathering place has been set up for an official lecture on the demerits of unofficial art, examples of which are propped against the drab gray walls between oxblood banners. Although the work of artists outside the system, the paintings nonetheless exemplify some of the bleakness and awkwardness of mainstream Soviet life to which they are the oppositional exception.(Storr, 16-17)

Nothing in Kabakov’s work could be construed as endorsing such a view of “opposition”; indeed, it is explicit purpose is to induce a metaphysical wholeness that reinterprets “the unity of opposites we learned about in school.” How then to understand the central conceit of Kabakov’s MOMA installation, that “apparently, someone or something was to appear in the city that evening, and not just anywhere, but right in the middle of the club hall.” The appearance and disappearance of this person occurs: “There is no single description of what happened–the reports of various witnesses maintain the most adamant discrepancies” but leading to a negative vision of sorts: “After all the commotion had subsided, the entire floor in the center of the hall was littered with groups of little white people, constantly exchanging places.” It is almost too easy to view this moment as an allegory for the collapse of central authority leading to a negative social space in which the masses circulate aimlessly, without direction. The too-availability of this reading does seem to indicate an influence of the Museum’s interpretative horizons, trading on Soviet history in a representative installation of Kabakov’s totalizing process. This is the crisis of emigration, of the literal materialization of the transcendent position outside a totality it organizes, and here it leads Kabakov’s partial, metaphysically sited narratives to a grand narrative of somewhat lesser interest. However, it may be said here, as elsewhere, that nothing is lost even in translation, for the likewise evident effect of Kabakov’s piece is to make each of the other installations in this mainstream extravangza–by Adrian Piper, Chris Burden, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, and Sophe Calle, indeed the entire permanent collection of MOMA used by Calle as the site for her work–interpretable as the compensatory projects of other residents of an expanded communal apartment. This sovietization of cultural horizons–an opening up from the oppositional politics of the Cold War to the reality of collective horizons–is a hopeful reason to reject Kabakov’s integration into the MOMA show as an imperial trophy collected under the banner of Western postmodernism.

Whose Subject?

Two aspects of post-Soviet subjectivity are evident in the examples of Dragomoshchenko and Kabakov. In the former, authority is impossibly sited from immanent horizons that entail voices of lyric subjectivity, collective memory, and scientific objectivity. The entire activity of the poem– its creation of new meaning in and of itself–is central to its implicit thesis that subjectivity, while everywhere in its own undoing, cannot be known from a transcendental position. The formal dimensions of Dragomoshchenko’s work– nonnarrative, fractal, predicative, and continually metaleptic–are an instance of a “world-making” poetics that works out of a continuity of fabricated worlds. Central to these constructions is their conveyance of futurity; the lyric voice will have been the authority of present address from a point in the distant future; both collective memory and scientific truth will have been revealed in similar ways. In order to understand the implications for post-Soviet culture here, it will be necessary to develop an account of Soviet subjectivity in relation to such utopian, transcendent, and immanent horizons–survivals, as indicated in the epigraph above, of an embodied collectivity (not necessarily national) preceding the state.

In Kabakov’s constructions, a converse implication for the subject may be descried, one that is more amenable to the international horizons of postmodern culture simply because it dismantles transcendence in the process of post-Soviet emigration. These displacements of subjectivity and authority are literally enacted in Kabakov’s shows in the high-rent collective apartments of the West, and in so doing take part in the process by which Soviet authority has been undermined through the foreign contacts that the Stalinist state did so much to prohibit. This new horizon is nothing if not ironic, and the emptying out of the “full presence” of the collective apartment into the nihilism of “stateness” illustrates an eerily dystopian moment. The difference from Western discourses of the postmodern, with their anchoring in rationality and critique, should equally be apparent–with the unforeseen result that the post-Soviet project makes the postmodern one appear even more qualified by an imaginary totality. Here the construction of the postmodern as an effect of Cold War oppositions–hinted at by Fredric Jameson’s citing of it as consequence of the “era of national revolutions” and to that extent inflected by their lost horizons–shows its “cultural specificity” to the West when compared to the emerging post-Soviet horizons.

Works Cited
- Davidson, Michael, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. San Francisco, 1991.
- Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii. Description. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles, 1990.
- —. “I(s).” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 127-37.
- —. “Syn/Opsis/Taxis.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 5-8.
- Dziubenko, Mikhail. “`New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 24-31.
- Jameson, Fredric. Introduction to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C., 1991.
- Kabakov, Ilya. Artist’s statement and text for installation, Dislocations, Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
- —. “Dissertation on the Cognition of the Three Layers . . . ” In Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art, 144-47.
- —. “On Emptiness.” In Ross, Between Spring and Summer, 53-60.
- —. Ten Characters. London, 1989.
- Molnar, Michael. Introduction to Dragomoshchenko, Description, 7-16.
- Parshchikov, Alexei. “New Poetry.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 17-23.
- Perec, Georges. La Vie mode d’emploi. New York, 19xx.
- Prigov, Dmitrii. “Conceptualism and the West.” Trans. Michael Molnar. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 12-16.
- Ross, David, ed. Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism. Boston, 1990.
- Storr, Robert. Catalogue essay on Kabakov in Storr, ed., Dislocations. New York, 1991.
- Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin, Tex., 1986.
- Tupitsyn, Margarita. Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Milan, 1989.
- Tupitsyn, Victor. “From the Communal Kitchen: A Conversation with Ilya Kabakov.” Trans. Jane Bobko. Arts 66, no. 2 (October 1991): 48-55.
September 25, 2013

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_A POSTMODERN READER_

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Eastgate Systems, Inc. announces:

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(Cambridge, MA) Eastgate Systems has announced the publication of
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Judy Malloy's artists books and electronic narratives, including
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     The Computer Is Not Sorry               The Houston Center
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     Women and Technology                    The National Library
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_its name was Penelope_ is available from:

Eastgate Systems, Inc.
PO Box 1307, Cambridge MA 02238 USA
(617) 924-9044 (800) 562-1638

14) ------------------------------------------------------------

_Minnesota Review_

Tell your friends!  Tell your librarians!
The new _Minnesota Review_'s coming to town!

**now under new management**

Fall 1992 issue (n.s. 39):  "PC WARS"

includes essays by:

* Richard Ohmann              "On PC and related matters"
* Michael Berube              "Exigencies of Value"
* Barry Sarchett              "Russell Jacoby, Anti-
                               Professionalism, and the Politics
                               of Cultural Nostalgia"
* Michael Sprinkler           "The War Against Theory"
* Balance Chow                "Liberal Education Left and Right"

Spring 1993 issue (n.s. 40):  "THE POLITICS OF AIDS"
Poetry, Fiction, Interviews, Essays.

topics include:

* Queer Theory and activism.
* Public image of AIDS.
* Politics of medical research.
* Health care policies.

Subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20
institutions/overseas.  The new _Minnesota Review_ is published
biannually and originates from East Carolina University beginning
with the Fall 1992 special issue.

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and
subscriptions to:

Jeffrey Williams, Editor
_Minnesota Review_
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC  27858-4353

15) ------------------------------------------------------------

_NOMAD_

An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Humanities, Arts, and
Sciences

_Nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as
intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing.  The
journal is a forum for those texts that explore the undefined
regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing.
_Nomad_ is published biannually and subscriptions are $9 for one
year (2 issues).  For information contact:

Mike Smith
406 Williams Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL  32306

E-mail:
Mike Smith
msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

16) -------------------------------------------------------------

_NO MORE NICE GIRLS_
author:  Ellen Willis

In her new collection of journalism and cultural criticism, _No
More Nice Girls_, Ellen Willis "offers serious readers the fruits
of her wide-ranging curiosity, thoughtful analysis, penetrating
insights, and utterly unapologetic commitment to freedom and
pleasure as liberating, radical ideas" (_Booklist_).  _No More
Nice Girls_ will be published by Wesleyan/University Press of New
England on February 26, 1993.

A former columnist and senior editor at the _Village Voice_,
Willis is the author of a previous collection, _Beginning to See
the Light_ (also available from Wesleyan/UPNE), which was hailed
as "stimulating and satisfying" by the _New York Times_ and as
the work of an "outspoken, articulate and thoughtful woman" by
the _Los Angeles Times_.  _No More Nice Girls_ brings her project
of cultural critique into the contemporary era of conservative
backlash.

Available through:

University Press of New England
23 South Main Street
Hanover  NH  03755
tel: (603) 643-7107
fax: (603) 643-1540

17) -------------------------------------------------------------

_NOUS REFUSE_

a new electronic collective
a new place to make news
a new place to write
a new place

contributors to date include:

joe amato
charles berstein
michael blitz
don byrd
luigi-robert drake
nancy dunlop
chris funkhouser
carolyn guyer
pierre joris
michael joyce
andrew levy
stuart moulthrop
derek owens
martha petry
david porush
martin rosenberg
armand schwerner
juliana spahr
kali tal
katie yates

to get involved, contact joe amato:
JAMATO@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU

18) -------------------------------------------------------------

_October_
Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics

The MIT Press

Edited by:  Rosalind Kraus
            Annette Michelson
            Yve-Alain Bois
            Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
            Hal Foster
            Denis Hollier
            John Rajchman

                              "OCTOBER, the 15-year old
                              quarterly of social and cultural
                              theory, has always seemed special.
                              Its nonprofit status, its cross-
                              disciplinary forays into film
                              and psychoanalytic thinking, and
                              its unyielding commitment to
                              history set it apart from the
                              glossy art magazines."
                                        --Village Voice

As the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _OCTOBER_
focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of
interpretation.  Original, innovative, provocative, each issue
examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical
and social contexts.

Come join _OCTOBER_'s exploration of the most important issues in
contemporary culture.
Subscribe Today!

Published Quarterly ISSN 0162-2870.  Yearly Rates:  Individual
$32.00; Institution $80.00; Student (copy of current ID required)
and Retired:  $22.00.  Outside USA add $14.00 postage and
handling.  Canadians add additional 7% GST.  Prepayment is
required.  Send check payable to _OCTOBER_ drawn against a US
bank, MasterCard or VISA number to:  MIT Press Journal / 55
Hayward Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 / TEL: (617) 233-2889 /
FAX: (617) 258-6779 / E-Mail:  journals-orders@mit.edu

19) -------------------------------------------------------------

_REPRESENTATIONS_

"...conveys an excitement
  rarely seen in academic
  periodicals.  The array of
  subjects is dizzying."
           -- Wendy Steiner
  Times Literary Supplement

SPECIAL ISSUE:  FUTURE LIBRARIES

Number 42 * Spring 1993
Edited by R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse

ROGER CHARTIER
"The Library Without Walls:  Fifteenth to Twenty-First
Centuries."

DOMANIQUE JAMET and HELENE WAYSBORD
"History, Philosophy, and Ambitions of the Bibliotheque de
France."

EMMANUEL LE ROY LADURIE
"The Everyday Life of an Administrator of the Bibliotheque
Nationale."

GEOFFREY NUNBERG
"The Place of Books."

ALAIN GIFFARD and GERALD GRUNBERG
"New Reading Technologies."

PROSSER GIFFORD
"Information and Democracy:  The Libraries of Eastern Europe."

ANTHONY VIDLER
"The Site of Reading:  Urban Libraries from Labrouste to
Perrault."

KENNETH DOWLIN and CATHY SIMON
"The New San Francisco Public Library:  Reprisals of the Civic
Mission."

Subscriptions:  Individuals $30.00, Students $22.00, Institutions
$57.00.  Outside U.S. add $6.00 postage.

To order, write:

_Representations_
University of California Press
Journals Division
2120 Berkeley Way
Berkeley CA  94720
fax: (510)643-7172 (VISA/MC only)

20) -------------------------------------------------------------

_RIF/T_
E-Poetry Literary Journal

                              In all arts there is a physical
                              component...We must expect great
                              innovations to transform the entire
                              technique of the arts.
                                                  --Paul Valery

This list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution
of an interactive literary journal: _RIF/T_ and related exchange
(2) collection of any information related to contemporary
poetics.

_RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the
media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.
Dynamic--not static, _RIF/T_ shifts and riffs with the diction of
"trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of
exchange.

_RIF/T_ has the listserv name e-poetry: to subscribe to e-poetry,
send the command

SUB e-poetry your name

to:  LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU via mail
message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not
the Subject: line).  For example:  SUB e-poetry John Doe

Owner:  Ken Sherwood
v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

21) -------------------------------------------------------------

_South Atlantic Quarterly_
Winter 1993 (Volume 92, Number 1)

_The World According to Disney_

Guest Editor:  Susan Willis

Contents:

Critical Vantage Points on Disney's World
Susan Willis

Reality Revisited
Karen Klugman

Of Mice and Ducks:  Benjamin and Adorno on Disney
Miriam Hansen

It's a Small World After All:  Disney and the Pleasures of
Identification
Jane Kuenz

The Cartoonist's Front
Holly Allen and Michael Denning

Disney World:  Public Use/Private State
Susan Willis

The Contemoprary Future of Tommorow
Shelton Waldrep

Technological Utopias
Alexander Wilson

Theme Park
Arata Isozaki

Subscription Prices:  $48 institutions, $24 individuals.  Single
issues $12.  Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.

Duke
University
Press
Journals
Division
Box 90660
Durham,
N.C. 27708

22) -------------------------------------------------------------

_SSCORE_
Social Science Computer Review

G. David Garson, Editor
Ronald Anderson, Co-Editor

The official journal of the Social Science Computing Association,
_SSCORE_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire
and share information on the research and teaching applications
of microcomputing.  Now, when you subscribe to _Social Science
Computer Review_, you automatically become a member of the Social
Science Computing Association.

Recent articles:

Social Impacts of Computing:  Codes of Professional Ethics
Ronald Anderson

Teledemocracy and Political Science
William H. Dutton

Trends in the Use of Computers in Economics Teaching in the
United Kingdom
Guy Judge and Phil Hobbs

The Essentials of Scientific Visualization:  Basic Techniques and
Common Problems
Steve E. Follin

Psychology:  Keeping up with the State of the Art in Computing
Charles Huff

Computer Assistance in Qualitative Sociology
David R. Heise

Automating Analysis, Visualization, and Other Social Science
Research Tasks
Edwin H. Carpenter

From Mainframes to Micros:  Computer Applications for
Antropologists
Robert V. Kemper, Ronald K. Wetherington, and Michael Adler

Quaterly
Subscription prices:  $48 individuals, $80 institutions
Single Issue:  $20
Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.
Canadian residents add 7% GST

Duke University Press/ Journals Division / Box 90660 /Durham NC
27708

23) -------------------------------------------------------------

_Studies in Popular Culture_
Dennis Hall, editor.

_Studies in Popular Culture_, the journal of the Popular Culture
Association in the South and the American Culture Association in
the South, publishes articles on popular culture and American
culture however mediated:  through film, literature, radio,
television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations,
events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life.
The journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the United
States, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, which include
distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural
geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass
communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.

Please direct editorial queries to the editor:
Dennis Hall
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville KY  40292
tel: (502) 588-6896/0509
Fax: (502) 588-5055
Bitnet:  DRHALL01@ULKYVM
Internet:  drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the English
Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292.
Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed
stamped envelope.  Black and White illustrations may accompany
the text.  Our preference is for essays that total, with notes
and bibliography, no more than twenty pages.  Documentation may
take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the
current MLA stylesheet is a useful model.  Please indicate if the
work is available on computer disk.  The editor reserves the
right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts.

_Studies in Popular Culture_, is published semiannually and is
indexed in the _PMLA Annual Bibliography_.  All members of the
Association receive _Studies in Popular Culture_.  Yearly
membership is $15.00 (International:  $20.00).  Write to the
Executive Secretary, Diane Calhoun-French, Academic Dean,
Jefferson Community College-SW, Louisville, KY 40272, for
membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets.  Volumes I-
XV are available for $225.00.

24) -------------------------------------------------------------

_VIRUS 23_

For those brave souls looking to explore the Secret of Eris, you
may wish to check out _VIRUS 23_.

2 and 3 are even and odd,
2 and 3 are 5,
therefore 5 is even and odd.

_Virus 23_ is a codename for all Erisian literature

Don Webb
6304 Laird Dr.
Austin, TX 78757
0004200716@mcimail.com

_VIRUS 23_ is the annual hardcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the
Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.  This is what a few of
cyberculture's luminaries have had to say about it:

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

_VIRUS 23_
Box 46
Red Deer, Alberta
Canada
T4N 5E7

Various chunks of _VIRUS 23_ can be found at Tim Oerting's
alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in
/public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out).

For more information online contact Darren Wershler-Henry:
grad3057@writer.yorku.ca

25) -------------------------------------------------------------

_Zines-L_

announcing a new list available from:  listserv@uriacc

To subscribe to _Zines-L_ send a message to:
listserv@uriacc.uri.edu

on one line type:
SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name

26) -------------------------------------------------------------

             _Postmodern Culture_ announces PMC-MOO

PMC-MOO is a new service offered (free of charge) by _Postmodern
Culture_.  PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality
environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of
the journal and participate in live conferences.  PMC-MOO will
also provide access to texts generated by _Postmodern Culture_
and by PMC-TALK, and it will provide the opportunity to
experience (or help to design) programs which simulate
object-lessons in postmodern theory.  PMC-MOO is based on the
LambdaMOO program, freeware by Pavel Curtis.

To connect to PMC-MOO, you *must* be on the internet.  If you
have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by
typing the command

telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777

at your command prompt.  Once you've connected to the server, you
should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.

If you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead
find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it
means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777
at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask
your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port
number. If you have the Emacs program on your system and would
like information about a customized client program for PMC-MOO
that uses Emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail.

27) -------------------------------------------------------------

*******************************
Call for papers/participants in
interdisciplinary conference on
Cyborgs.
*******************************

Please contact:

Steven Mentor
Dept. of English
GN-30
University of Washington
Seattle WA  98195
e-mail:  cybunny@U.Washigton.edu

We welcome all disciplines and perspectives including historians,
philosophers, computer scientists, bio(nic?) engineers, medical
technologists, cognitive psychologists, anthropologists,
sociologists, science fiction writers, poets, artists, and of
course, cyborgs them/ourselves.  We are planning to put on the
conference in Winter, 1994, so please write us with issues,
questions, quandaries, directions, permutations.

28) -------------------------------------------------------------

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Papers on Don DeLillo
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Papers are solicited on the topic of the writings of Don DeLillo
(his fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible inclusion in a
cluster section of a future issue of _Postmodern Culture_.
Selected essays may also be included in a book collection planned
for later publication.

Inquiries may be sent to Glen Scott Allen at:

E7E4ALL@TOE.TOWSON.EDU

or by mail to:

Stephen D. Bernstein
English Department
University of Michigan
Flint, MI 48502

29) -------------------------------------------------------------

*********************
Call for Submissions
*********************

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_ is a research project
investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative
writers.

The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware,
critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to
sites of publication.

We would like to request writers to submit their works for
review.  Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their
publications with subscription fees and submission formats.  We
are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach
creative writing for the hypertext format.

To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a
page or two in length.  Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or
hardcopy to:

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
3 Westcott Upper
London, Ontario
N6C 3G6
E-mail:  KEEPC@QUCD.QUEENSU.CA

30) -------------------------------------------------------------

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
Call for Papers/Fiction/Poetry
_Minnesota Review_ Fall, 1993
*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+

Fall Issue (n.s. 41, 1993):  "The Institution of English"

Professional context and institutional formation of literature.
We welcome articles and particularly review-essays on recent
trends in criticism, theory, and literature such as "The New
Medievalism" or the _boundary 2_ school, as well as on
institutional structures, such as NEH, MLA, graduate
assistantships, SCT, the rise of cultural studies programs, new
journals, book series, and the politics of publishing.

Essays, interviews, and reviews due by June 1, 1993.

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and
subscriptions to:

Jeffrey Williams
Editor
_Minnesota Review_
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville NC  27858-4353

31) -------------------------------------------------------------

_PHAGE_

Welcome to the Future
---------------------

_PHAGE_ is a new magazine for people who are living on the new
edge, surfing along the new wave of radical thought.  This
magazine was born from the need for a forum for new ideas in
print media.

_PHAGE_ will be designed and produced on the Macintosh computer,
in an 8 1/2 x 11" format, and each issue will be in the area of
64 pages.  We are planning to sell the magazine at a cover price
of $3.50 (US), but until costs are measured, we cannot say for
sure.

We are looking for submissions and assistance with this project
from all angles:  fiction writers, essayists, ranters, graphic
designers, artists, poets, etc..  Submissions are welcome in any
form, in any style or tone, though that is not a guarantee that
everything we receive will be printed.  We are looking for
submissions as soon as possible, but feel free to send them
whenever you like.  However, due to a lack of available
resources, we are unable, for now, to reward monetarily those who
contribute to _PHAGE_.  While we have little money, our primary
interest is producing the highest-quality magazine possible,
containing an immense spectrum of information.

Possible topics include:

Focusing on the Edges of Culture, examining the Fringes of Reason
and the Reasons of the Fringe, the Here and Now and Soon-to-Be,
via unstructured Tones that Ebb and Flow from In-Form Information
to Formless Rants of Altered States.

If you would like to contribute to _PHAGE_ in any way, please
send all queries, submissions, tips, words of wisdom, etc., to us
on the Internet at:

obscure@mindvox.phantom.com
obscure@zero.cypher.com

or

ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu

If you do not have Internet access, please send mail to:

_PHAGE_ Magazine
PO Box XXX
Green Bay, WI  54304

32) -------------------------------------------------------------

[PMC editor's note: the SUNY Press Series _Postmodern Culture_ is
not affiliated with the electronic journal _Postmodern Culture_.]

*************************************
Announcement and Call for Submissions
_Postmodern Culture_
*************************************

_Postmodern Culture_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor:  Joseph Natoli
Editor:         Carola Sautter

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities
Michigan State University

We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a
postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics
to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential
campaign to Rodney King--and academic discourses from art and
literature to politics and history, sociology and science to
women's studies, from computer studies to cultural studies.

This series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-be-
completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto
postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low
culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business
and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs,"
formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse,
analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives,
truths and parodies of truths.

By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has
overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link
our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and
events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them.
Modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes
postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the
difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and
diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

Accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style"
that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic
spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist
and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple-
narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational."

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001

33) -------------------------------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Papers
_PSYCHE:  an interdisciplinary
journal of research on consciousness_
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural
issue of _PSYCHE:  an interdisciplinary journal of research on
consciousness_ (ISSN:  1039-723X).

_PSYCHE_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting
the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness
and its relation to the brain.  _PSYCHE_ publishes material
relevant to that exploration from the perspectives afforded by
the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology,
Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology.
Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged.
_PSYCHE_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a
diverse academic audience four times per year.  As an electronic
journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not
apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not
attempt to abuse the medium.  _PSYCHE_ also publishes a hardcopy
version simultaneously with the electronic version.  Long
articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated,
synopsized, or eliminated from the hardcopy version.

Submitted matter should be preceded by:  the author's name;
address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address.
Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-
200 word abstract as well.  Note that peer review will be blind,
meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to
the referees.  In the event that an article needs to be shortened
for publication in the print version of _PSYCHE_, the author will
be responsible for making any alterations requested by the
editors.

Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.
If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as
separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by
readers locally.

Authors of accepted articles assign to _PSYCHE_ the right to
publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to
make it available permanently in an electronic archive.  Authors
will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may
republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge
_PSYCHE_ as the original source of publication.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions to the electronic version of _PSYCHE_ may be
initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L
Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

34) -------------------------------------------------------------

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
Call for Papers on the
work of Derek Walcott
*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+

_VERSE_ is calling for submissions for a special issue devoted to
the work of Derek Walcott:  12-15 page articles on his poetry or
plays; poems that are indebted to Walcott in some way.  _VERSE_
is a journal published both in the UK and out of the College of
William and Mary in Virginia.  The articles should be written for
an informed, but not necessarily academic, audience.  Deadline:
end of August.

Please direct inquires to:

Susan M. Schultz
Department of English
1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawaii-Manoa
Honolulu HI  96822
(h) 808-942-3554
(w) 808-956-3061

35) -----------------------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS

PANEL: Feminist Theory and Technoculture
CONFERENCE: Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA)
DATE: April 8 & 9, 1994
PLACE:  Pittsburgh, PA

This panel will address a variety of feminist theories
(poststructuralist, Marxist, Gender and Sexuality Studies,
ecofeminism, etc.) as they respond to the problems and
possibilities of the culture of technology.  Topics include (but
are not limited to) the Internet (incl. bbs, lists, email,
electronic conferences, MUSHES, MUDS, etc); television,
telephone, fax and other electronic media; and technoliterature.

Send inquiries to lxh16@po.cwru.edu

Send abstracts and papers by September 1 to
Prof. Lila Hanft
Dept. of English
11112 Bellflower Rd.
Case Western Reserve Univ.
Cleveland, OH  44106-7117

36) -------------------------------------------------------------

_International Conference on Refereed
Electronic Journals:  Towards a Consortium
for Networked Publications_

October 1-2, 1993
(Friday & Saturday)

Sponsored by:

Medical Research Council
Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council
Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada
The University of Manitoba

The Delta Winnipeg Hotel
288 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3C 0B8

The aims of the conference are: (1) to make academic merit the
sole consideration in the publication of journal-type research,
(2) to advance the idea that the academic community should have a
hand in determining what gets published and how it is
disseminated, (3) to provide an outlet for research publication
that is not subject to the severe economic constraints of
traditional paper-journal publishing, (4) to make collective use
of the scholarly advantages of network publication (savings in
production costs, increased speed in publication and
dissemination process), (5) to provide an effective and low-cost
means for universities and learned societies to play a greater
role as disseminators of research information, and not only as
producers and consumers.

This historic two-day event will be organized as a series of
plenary working sessions that will include presentations from
major resource people from a variety of fields.  An exhibition of
the latest computer technology is also planned.  Registration is
limited to 200 participants.

Registration Information

Fees:

     If paid by September 1, 1993:           $150.00 (Cdn)
     If paid after September 1, 1993:        $200.00 (Cdn)
     Dinner for Guests of participants:      $ 30.00 (Cdn)

Requests for information or the completed Conference Registration
Form together with payment should be sent to:

Ms. Helga Dyck, Co-ordinator
Institute for the Humanities
Room 108 Isbister Bldg.
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Canada
ph.: (204) 474-9599
fax: (204) 275-5781
e-mail:  umih@ccu.umanitoba.ca

37) -------------------------------------------------------------

               "THE WATCH-TOWERS OF PEACE"

          An Art Installation By Fred Forrest (FR)
               May 28th - 4th June 1993

          Installation telephone Numbers:

               0043 3453 5411
               0043 3453 5412
               0043 3453 5413

SEND YOUR MESSAGES OF PEACE TO FORMER YUGOSLAVIA FROM ACROSS THE
BORDER IN AUSTRIA.

RING THESE NUMBERS FROM EVERY CORNER OF YOUR PLANET TO COVER THE
LAND OF WAR WITH SLOGANS OF PEACE.

DISSEMINATE YOUR ENERGIES IN REAL TIME THROUGH POSITIVE WAVES.

We would like to draw your attention to an installation that will
be realised by the artist Fred Forrest within the framework of
the European Month of Culture in Graez.  The installation will
incorporate the general theme "Entegenzte Grenzen" (Dismissed
Borders) and function as leading project.  It will open in April
and can already be considered as extraordinary and exemplary.

The technological communication media Fred Forrest is going to
install at the Slovenian border will be placed in such a way that
they will look in the direction of the former Yugoslavian
territory and are called

"OBSERVATION TOWERS FOR PEACE".

These technological communication media will consist of five
sound amplifiers connected to computers and the INTERNATIONAL
TELEPHONE NETWORK.  The metal structures designed to carry these
strong amplifiers will be erected in Ehrenhausen, directly at the
Austrian-Slovenian border.  Through these amplifiers, peace
messages are to be emitted in real-time mode.  These peace
messages will be transmitted to the amplifiers via telephone from
the whole world over.

A computer will be used to transform the messages via synthesizer
into one collective sound signal.  The modulation of this
whistling sound will change in accordance with both the number of
incoming phone calls and the distance from which they come.

There is no doubt that the interaction of Fred Forrest's project
and its symbolic dimension in view of the present geopolitical
situation make the installation a first class media event and
emphasize the meaning of our modern society's new forms of
communication.

For more information, please write to:

          Fred Forrest
          Territoire Du MZ,
          60540 Anserville,
          France

          Tel 44 08 43 05
          Fax 44 08 59 67

38) -------------------------------------------------------------

_MONTAGE 93:  INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THE IMAGE_
(1-800-724-4332)  montage93@brock1p.bitnet

The future of visual communication will open up to educators,
professionals and the public during an international festival
slated for July 11 through August 7, 1993 in Rochester, New York.

The festival will explore the present and future of image-making
as well as the fusion of art and technology.  _MONTAGE 93_ will
feature the latest advances in imaging technology through a
series of events which include a Trade Show, International Film
and Video Festivals, Lecture and Panel series, Arts & Technology
Exposition, International Student Festival and world-premiere
exhibitions.

The lecture and panel discussion series will focus on numerous
topics including digital museums, living in the computer age,
privacy and civil liberties in the computer age, Virtual Reality,
the future of film and video, and more.

Sixteen exhibitions, including 11 premiering at the festival,
along with the works of over 300 international artists will
feature photography, computer graphics, holography, video,
electrostatic imaging, electronic transmission and other advanced
techniques.

The Trade Show will include a pavilion of over 50 international
companies dealing with many facets of technology.  Expect to see
manufacturers of next-generation of digital cameras, Interactive
and Virtual Reality, Computer 2D and 3D graphic software,
business imaging and more.

The International Student Festival will draw about 500 students
and educators from across the globe.  A Media Teachers
Educational Conference will also take place during _MONTAGE 93_.

The Arts & Technology Exposition puts you inside simulated studio
environments as artists and tool developers demonstrate still,
moving, dimensional, and interactive image-making systems.

The International Film Festival will feature screenings of new
films, 35 and 16 mm, created by independent producers.

Video, Etc. is a showcase of video, computer animation, and time-
based electronic work by international artists and independent
producers.

Several professional conferences will take place during _MONTAGE
93_ including:  High-Tech Global New York; Oracle; Fast Rewind;
International Visual Sociology Association; and the Media Arts
Teachers Association.

_MONTAGE 93_ now has available ticketing and registration
information.  This includes the names and topics scheduled for
panel discussions and seminars.  Please call 1-800-724-4332 and
request additional information or call (716) 442-6722 (overseas)
or e-mail:  montage93@brock1p.bitnet.

39) -------------------------------------------------------------

_FEMISA_

FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

_FEMISA_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think
about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world
politics, international political economy, or global politics,
can communicate.

Formally, _FEMISA_ was established to help those members of the
Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the _International
Studies Association_ keep in touch.  More generally, I hope that
_FEMISA_ can be a network where we share information in the area
of feminism or gender and international studies about
publications or articles, course outlines, questions about
sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or
upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to
the _International Studies Association_.

To subscribe:  send one line message in the BODY of mail-message

                       sub femisa your name

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

To unsub send the one line message

                           unsub femisa

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

Owner:  Deborah Stienstra  stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca
        Department of Political Science
        University of Winnipeg

40) -------------------------------------------------------------

_HOLOCAUS:  Holocaust list_

HOLOCAUS on LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET
         or LISTSERV@UICVM.UIC.EDU

HOLOCAUS@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail
discussion groups ("lists") at the University of Illinois,
Chicago.  It is sponsored by the University's History Department
and its Jewish Studies Program.

To subscribe to HOLOCAUS, you need an Internet or Bitnet computer
account.  From that account, send this message to
LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@uicvm.uic.edu:

                  SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

Use your own Firstname and Lastname.  You will be automatically
added.  You can read all the mail, and send your own postings to
everyone on the list (We have about 100 subscribers around the
world right now).

Owner:  JimMott@spss.com

The HOLOCAUS policies are:

1.   The coverage of the list will include the Holocaust itself,
     and closely related topics like anti-Semitism, and Jewish
     history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes
     in the history of WW2, Germany, and international diplomacy.

2.   We are especially interested in reaching college teachers of
     history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the
     Holocaust.  In 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in
     the US and Canada teaching courses on the Holocaust (154 in
     History departments, 67 in Religion, and 46 in Literature).
     An even larger number of professors teach units on the
     Holocaust in courses on Jewish history (taught by 273
     faculty) and World War II (taught by 373), not to mention
     many other possible courses.  Most of these professors own
     PC's, but do not use them for e-mail.  We hope our list will
     be one inducement to go on line.  _HOLOCAUS_ will therefore
     actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides,
     ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will
     be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture,
     or an entire course.

3.   H-Net is now setting up an international board of editors to
     guide _HOLOCAUS_ policy and to help stimulate contributions.

4.   _HOLOCAUS_ is moderated by Jim Mott (JimMott@spss.com), a
     PhD in History.  The moderator will solicit postings (by e-
     mail, phone and even by US mail), will assist people in
     subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine
     inquiries, and will consolidate some postings.  The
     moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type
     information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings
     of sessions at conventions).  It may prove feasible to
     commission book and article reviews, and to post book
     announcements from publishers.  Anyone with suggestions
     about what _HOLOCAUS_ can and might do is invited to send in
     the ideas.

5.   The tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic
     standards and styles will prevail.  _HOLOCAUS_ is affiliated
     with the _International History Network_.

6.   _HOLOCAUS_ is a part of H-Net, a project run by computer-
     oriented historians at the U of Illinois.  We see moderated
     e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they
     have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from
     across the world.  Our first list on urban history, _H-
     URBAN@UICVM_, recently started up with Wendy Plotkin as
     moderator.  _H-WOMEN_ is in the works, with discussions
     underway about other possibilities like Ethnic, Labor, and
     US South.  We are helping our campus Jewish Studies program
     set up _JSTUDY_ (restricted to the U of Illinois Chicago
     campus, for now), and are considering the creation of _H-
     JEWISH_, also aimed at academics, but covering the full
     range of scholarship on Jewish history.  If you are
     interested in any of these projects, please e-write Richard
     Jensen, for we are now (as of late April) in a critical
     planning stage.

7.   H-Net has an ambitious plan for training historians across
     the country in more effective use of electronic
     communications.  Details of the H-Net plan are available on
     request from Richard Jensen, the director, at:

                         campbelld@apsu
or
                       u08946@uicvm.uic.edu

41) -------------------------------------------------------------

_UTNE READER INTERNET E-MAIL SALONS_

Calling all:
                      _Utne Reader_ readers
              Neighborhood Salon Associates members
                        Interested others

The Utne Reader Neighborhood Salon Association is launching a
global network of Internet mailing lists designed to foster small
group dialogue about hot topics and timeless conundra.  We call
them E-mail Salons and they are patterned after the hundreds of
Neighborhood Salons (face-to-face) that we've helped form across
North America since 1991.

Helping to revitalize democracy through vigorous discussion of
issues and ideas is part of the mission of the Neighborhood Salon
Association (NSA), our not-for-profit community service, funded
in part by the Surdna Foundation.  We believe that both online
and face-to-face salons help revive the endangered art of
conversation.

Anyone who does not live in Canada or the United States can
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($20 Canadian) you receive:

* Placement in at least one E-mail Salon of up to 25           
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  in your area.
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  guide to conducting salons, council, and study circles.

WILL MY NAME END UP ON A JUNKMAIL LIST?

We will not be giving or selling any of our salon mailing lists
to anyone.  Likewise, we ask that you not use any list of salon
names for anything other than salon-related communications.
Everyone has entrusted us with their name, street and E-mail
addresses for this one purpose only; please respect this trust.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

           _Utne Reader E-mail Salon Application Form_

First name:
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September 25, 2013

Women and Islam

Lahoucine Ouzgane

Dept. of English
University of Alberta
LOUZGANE@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992. Pp. viii + 296. Cloth, $30.00

Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam centers on the conditions and lives of women in Middle Eastern Arab history. It is a response both to the growing strength of Islamist movements, which urge a return to the laws and practices set forth in the core Islamic discourse, and to the way in which Arab women are discussed in the West.

The book is divided into three parts. “Part One: The Pre-Islamic Middle East” includes a chapter on Mesopotamia and another on The Mediterranean Middle East. Citing archeological evidence, Ahmed points out that the subordination of Middle Eastern women became more or less institutionalized with the rise of urban centers in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers between 3500 and 3000 B.C.E. These centers gave rise to military competitiveness, the patriarchal family, the exclusion of women from most of the professional classes, the designation of women’s sexuality as the property of men, and the use of the veil to differentiate between “respectable” and “disreputable” women. Challenging the assumption that Islamic societies are inherently oppressive to women–a task that she undertakes throughout her book–Ahmed stresses the fact that the “Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian, and eventually Islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors” (18).

Reviewing, for example, some of the salient features of Byzantine society, Ahmed notes that the birth of a boy (but not that of a girl) was greeted with cries of joy, that, “barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled” (26), and that the system of relying on eunuchs to enforce the separation of the sexes was already in place. To show continuity with the rigid Byzantine customs, Ahmed turns to Classical Greek, and specifically Aristotelian, theories which conceived of women “as innately and biologically inferior in both mental and physical capacities–and thus as intended for their subservient position by ‘nature’” (29). Citing several scholars–Sarah Pomeroy, Dorothy Thompson, Naphtali Lewis, Jean Vercoutter, and Christiane Desroches Noblecourt–Ahmed finds that only the “remarkably nonmisogynist” culture of the New Kingdom in Egypt “accorded women high esteem” (31). But neither Ahmed nor her sources explain this anomalous situation. The rest of the chapter outlines how, in the centuries immediately preceding the rise of Islam, the politically dominant Christianity brought with it “the religious sanction of women’s social subordination and the endorsement of their essential secondariness” (34).

The four chapters of Part Two are grouped under the heading of “Founding Discourses.” Here, the text deals with Arabia at the time of the rise of Islam, carefully delineating the changes brought about by the new religion when it spread to the rest of the Middle East. When Muhammed became the established prophet, women lost their economic independence, their autonomy, and the right to a monogamous marriage. The period also witnessed the institution of the patrilineal and patriarchal marriage (Aisha was ten years old when she was married to Muhammed). After the prophet’s death in 632, the mechanisms for controlling women’s lives were more clearly articulated by the succeeding caliphs. Under Umar’s reign (634-44), for instance, segregated prayers were established (with a male imam for the women); and polygamy and marriage of nine- or ten-year-old girls were sanctioned. Umar himself was very harsh toward women both in private and in public.

At the end of this chapter, Ahmed makes one of the most important points of her argument: what has been consistently overlooked, she declares, is “the broad ethical field of meaning” in which these restrictive practices against women were embedded–“the ethical teachings Islam was above all established to articulate” (62). Her point has far-reaching implications for how we understand Islam’s attitude toward women. “When those teachings are taken into account,” she says,

the religion's understanding of women and gender emerges as far more ambiguous than this account might suggest. Islam's ethical vision, which is stubbornly egalitarian, including with respect to the sexes, is thus in tension with, and might even be said to subvert, the hierarchical structure of marriage pragmatically instituted in the first Islamic society.(62-63)

To prove that Islam recognizes the “identicalness of men and women and the equal worth of their labor” (65), Ahmed quotes the following Quranic verse: “I suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste, be he a man or a woman: The one of you is of the other.” But even if one were to overlook the problem of translation (another translator, N.J. Dawood, renders the passage in question this way: “I will deny no man or woman among you the reward of their labours. You are the offspring of one another”), it is hard to argue for a “stubbornly egalitarian” vision when the only Quranic Sura entitled “Women” is addressed to men, and where one can read that “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. . . . As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them” (Sura 4: 34).

From Ahmed’s point of view, Muslim women suffered the worst excesses of the pragmatic teachings of Islam under the Abbasid dynasty ruling at Baghdad (749-1258). The Abbasid elite men kept enormous harems of wives and concubines and sanctioned polygamy and the seclusion of women; an enormous number of Arab soldiers who arrived in Irak took wives and concubines from the local non-Muslim populations; and “one young man,” we are told, “on receiving his inheritance, went out to purchase ‘a house, furniture, concubines and other objects’” (83). To survive in this kind of atmosphere, women had to resort to manipulation, poison, intense rivalries, and falsehoods. (“Zubaida, royal-born wife of Harun al-Rashid, jealous of his attachment to a particular concubine, was advised to stop nagging–and felt the need to make up for her jealous lapse by presenting al-Rashid with ten concubines.”) Once again, Ahmed observes, the ethical injunctions of Islam were rarely translated into enforceable laws. Only texts that orthodox theologians, legists, and philosophers (the likes of Al-Ghazali) created were–and continue to be–regarded as the core prescriptive texts of Islam. But Ahmed also makes it clear that this intense misogyny was neither originally nor exclusively Muslim in character, but rather the consequence of a cultural negotiation between Islam and “an urban Middle East with already well-articulated misogynist attitudes and practices”:

[B]y licensing polygamy, concubinage, and easy divorce for men, originally allowed under different circumstances in a different society, Islam lent itself to being interpreted as endorsing and giving religious sanction to a deeply negative and debased conception of women.(87)

“Part Three: New Discourses” is narrow in focus– dealing mainly with Egypt from early 19th Century to the present–but crucial to a good understanding of Islam and women today. The period witnessed the Western economic encroachment on the Middle East and the emergence of the “modern” states. While the inroads made by European goods in Egypt were decidedly negative for women–who worked mainly in textiles–the process of change set in motion would prove broadly positive for them. Most importantly, Ahmed notes, the period saw “the emergence of women themselves as a central subject for national debate. For the first time since the establishment of Islam, the treatment of women in Islamic custom and law–the license of polygamy, easy male access to divorce, and segregation–were openly discussed . . .” (128). But the debates about “women” and social reform always took place in a European context, so to speak: the Muslim society felt the need to catch up to a relatively “advanced” European culture. This, indeed is one of Ahmed’s central arguments. The problem with proponents of “improvement in the status of women,” she observes, is that they had

from early on couched their advocacy in terms of the need to abandon the (implicitly) 'innately' and 'irreparably' misogynist practices of the native culture in favor of the customs and beliefs of another culture--the European.(129)

Ahmed extends this discussion in Chapter 8: “The Discourse of the Veil”–one of the best treatments of the subject I have seen and, for me, the strongest part of Ahmed’s study. The chapter begins with Ahmed’s examination of Qassim Amin’s The Liberation of Woman, a book that provoked intense and furious debate upon its publication in 1899 (with more than thirty books and articles appearing in response) and that is traditionally regarded as marking the beginning of feminism in the Arab world. Amin argues passionately for the abolition of the veil and for fundamental changes in culture, society, and even in Arab character. Of Egyptian women he writes that they are

not in the habit of combing their hair every day . . . nor do they bathe more than once a week. They do not know how to use a toothbrush and do not attend to what is attractive in clothing, though their attractiveness and cleanliness strongly influence men's inclinations. They do not know how to rouse desire in their husband, nor how to retain his desire or increase it. . . .(Quoted in Ahmed, 157)

At this point, Ahmed remarks that the fusion of the issue of women and culture and the expanded signification of the veil originated in the discourses of European societies:

Those ideas were interjected into the native discourse as Muslim men exposed to European ideas began to reproduce and react to them and, subsequently and more persuasively and insistently, as Europeans--servants of Empire and individuals resident in Egypt--introduced and actively disseminated them.(149)

Throughout this segment of her argument, Ahmed insists that “the peculiar practices of Islam with respect to women had always formed part of the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam” (149). Prior to the seventeenth century, Western ideas about Islam derived mainly from travelers and crusaders. The other source of Western ideas of Islam came from the narrative of colonial domination regarding the inferiority of all other cultures and societies, a narrative that successfully co-opted the language of feminism and whose thesis was that “Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized this oppression, and that these customs were fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies” (151-52). If the situation of Egyptian women was to improve, Lord Cromer deemed it essential that Egyptians “be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization” because the practices of veiling and seclusion constituted “the fatal obstacle” to the Egyptians’ “attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization” (quoted in Ahmed, 153).

But when Ahmed examines Cromer’s policies in Egypt, they turn out to be extremely detrimental to Egyptian women: he placed restrictions on government schools, raised school fees, and discouraged the training of women doctors because, as he declared, “throughout the civilized world, attendance by medical men is still the rule.” Ahmed also underscores the fact that “This champion of the unveiling of Egyptian women was, in England, founding member and sometime president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage” (1953). Others besides the official servants of empire shared and promoted Cromer’s ideas. For the missionaries, the degradation of women in Islam was legitimate ground for their attacks on native culture, so missionary-school teachers actively attacked the practice of veiling by trying to persuade girls to defy their families and not wear one. Ahmed quotes a missionary woman’s conviction that marriage in Islam was “not founded on love but on sensuality” and that a Muslim wife, “buried alive behind the veil,” was regarded as “prisoner and slave rather than . . . companion and help-mate” (154). To show how insiduous and widespread this campaign against the veil was, Ahmed cites the case of the well-meaning European feminist Eugnie Le Brun, who earnestly encouraged young Egyptian women to cast off the veil as their first step toward female liberation (154).

Qassim Amin, “son of Cromer and colonialism,” had apparently internalized the colonialist perception of Egyptian culture, and his Liberation of Woman merely replicated this perception. Cromer’s well-known pronouncements (on the differences between, on the one hand, the European man’s close reasoning, his clarity, his natural logic, and his love of symmetry, and, on the other hand, the Oriental’s slipshod reasoning) are echoed in Amin’s assertion that

For the most part the European man uses his intellect, but when circumstances require it, he deploys force. He does not seek glory from his possessions and colonies, for he has enough of this through his intellectual achievements and scientific inventions.(Quoted in Ahmed, 155)

As colonialists and missionaries have always maintained, to change a culture, il faut chercher la femme. To make Muslim society abandon its backward ways, Amin argued, required changing the women–for whom, as noted earlier, he reserved his most virulent contempt: “The grown man is none other

than his mother shaped him in childhood," and this is the essence of this book. . . . It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful. This is the noble duty that advanced civilization has given to women in our age and which she fulfills in advanced societies.(Quoted in Ahmed, 156; emphasis in original)

The irony here, Ahmed argues, is that it is Western discourse that in the first place determined the new meanings of the veil: Muslim men exposed to European ways felt the humiliation of being described as uncivilized because “their” women were veiled. Amin’s ideas can thus be explained only in the context of the authority and global dominance of the Western world, for, as Ahmed says, “the connection between the issues of culture and women, and more precisely between the cultures of Other men and the oppression of women, was created by Western discourse” (165). Ahmed does not deny that Islamic societies oppressed women: “They did and do; that is not in dispute.” Rather, she wants to emphasize “the political uses” of the idea that Islam oppressed women, so as to challenge the “vague and inaccurate understanding of Muslim societies,” an understanding derived from what patriarchal colonialists identified as the sources and main form of women’s oppression in Islamic culture. In short, the attention given to the issue of the veil far outweighs its significance and obscures the real and substantive matters of women’s rights, including their right to identify what they (and not Cromer or Amin) define as significant sites of struggle.

Chapter 9, “The First Feminists,” looks at the two founding feminist discourses that appeared in Egypt in the first three decades of this century. While the dominant voice, closely allied with the westernizing and secularizing tendencies of society, promoted the desirability of progress toward Western-type societies, the alternative voice, wary of and opposed to Western ways, searched for ways of articulating female subjectivity within a native Islamic discourse (174). Here, Ahmed deals briefly with the work of such figures as Huda Sharawi, Malak Nassef, Mai Ziyada, Alila Rifaat, and Nawal El-Saadawi. For the first time, Egyptian women themselves were exploring the implications of a male-gendered debate and its fixation on the veil.

In the last chapter, “The Struggle for the Future,” Ahmed examines the significance of a “new” phenomenon in Egypt known as al-ziyy al-islami or the Islamic dress:

Men complying with the requirement of modesty may wear Arabian-style robes (rather than Egyptian robes), sandals, and sometimes a long scarf on the head, or they may wear baggy trousers and loose shirts. Women wear robes in a variety of styles. . . . but the skirts are ankle-deep and the sleeves long . . . and some of them, depending on how they personally interpret the requirement for modesty, wear face veils."(220- 21)

Ahmed’s point is that the Islamic dress might be seen as a democratic one, erasing class origins; it is also economical, and most importantly for women, it gives them a great deal of social mobility while preserving their native culture. Ultimately, the Islamic dress “is the uniform of arrival, signaling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity” (225).

As no other general survey of women and gender in Islam exists, Women and Gender in Islam is a welcome contribution to the subject and particularly to the current debates about the “inherently misogynist” nature of Islam. The book is a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and gender in the Middle East, a part of the world that has exercised–and continues to exercise– a compelling influence on the Western imagination.

September 25, 2013
Cyfy Pomo?

Eric Rabkin

Dept. of English
University of Michigan
esrabkin@umich.edu

Ketterer, David. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. ix + 206 pp. $27.50 cloth.

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. Duke University Press, 1991. xvii + 387 pp. $17.95 paper.

. . . The review was the color of an electron spinning to the frequency of anti-matter . . .

“Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.” shouts two simultaneous stories: in boldface, a three-sentence poster series of incestuous desire, erotic violence, and the military-industrial complex; intercut, five pages of media-spawned obsessive need for dripping flesh, mass mind control, mechanical sex, and orgasmic death. This is but one of the “compressed novels” in J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1967), a precursor text for both David Ketterer and Larry McCaffery.

In ancient China, the followers of Mozi (c. 479-381 B.C.E.) believed that all judgments should rest on the distinction between usefulness and uselessness, but Zhuangzi (c. 369-286 B.C.E.) offered the parable of “The Useless Shu Tree.” Huizi complained that the huge Shu tree was too twisted to yield planks and too mottled to yield veneer. Zhuangzi replied that from the tree’s viewpoint these were useful traits because all the other trees in the forest had long since been cut down to make planks and veneer. Better, Zhuangzi advised, to find a different use for the tree, to sit beneath it and to rest in its shade.

The books by Ketterer and McCaffery may look like they should be read, cover to cover, page by page. They should not. If it is useful to speak of readable and writable texts, perhaps it is also useful to speak of consultable and compilable texts. Telephone directories are both. Ketterer’s anthology of Canadian fiction is consultable; McCaffery’s “casebook” is compilable.

In our postmodern times the ideology of realism has come increasingly under attack, and Canadian literature, no less than British or American literature, has turned increasingly to various nonrealistic and metafictional forms--which frequently include, or approximate, SF and fantasy. The present visibility of Canadian SF and fantasy, then, is largely attributable to the dissolution of the realistic paradigm.(Ketterer 3)

Promise A: There will be a demonstration that Canadian literature has turned increasingly to F&SF. Discharge: A book-length narrative catalog–arranged in chapters by language (English and French) and historical period (e.g., before and after the 1984 publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer!) and genre (F and SF), peppered by the occasional connected, often insightful, page or two on a single work (e.g., Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale)–showing that there is more Canadian F&SF, but no comparison is made with total Canadian literary production. Perhaps the country is simply producing more everything as means of production improve and population increases. Harlequin Books, after all, is Canadian.

Promise B: There will be a demonstration that this Canadian generic turning arises from a postmodern assault on realism. Discharge: Canadian F&SF has ever more prominent practitioners (Gibson, Elizabeth Vonarburg) and Canada’s best known authors have turned from time to time to F&SF (Atwood and occasional passages by Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence), but Gibson is a native of the U.S., Vonarburg of France, and the three native Canadians have returned to realism.

Promise C: There will be a demonstration that Canadian literature has “present visibility.” Discharge: The heart of cyberpunk, the putative SF projection of postmodernism, is Neuromancer, but “there’s nothing here linking Gibson to any Canadian tradition” (143). Hail, Ballard!

“What makes for the very best Canadian SF and fantasy does not have anything to do with Canada at all” (166).

Whazza matter, Bucky? You say we have a non-subject? You say you want to yawn? You say you can’t imagine reading a hundred and sixty-six pages about F&SF in Canada that offer little extended argument and omit the magical Robert Kroetsch (e.g., What the Crow Said, 1978)? Well, listen up, ’cause this book has the most helpful Bibliography around on its targets and a cleverly detailed Table of Contents and a pretty darned good Index and you can use ’em all to track down languages and periods and genres and read just what the doctor ordered OR follow up on any of the twenty biggest Names, and, believe it or not, there are twenty–count ’em–twenty: Margaret Atwood, David Cronenberg, Robertson Davies, Charles de Lint, Gordon Dickson, William Gibson, Herbert L. Gold, Phyllis Gotlieb, Guy Gavriel Kay, W.P. Kinsella, Margaret Laurence, Stephen Leacock, Laurence Manning, Judith Merril, Brian Moore, Spider Robinson, Robert Service, William Shatner, A.E. van Vogt, Elisabeth Vonarburg. And a diverse and estimable bunch they are.

Yeah, yeah, half these folks moved away from Canada and nearly half moved to it and some are only Big Names in g-e-n-r-e (de Lint, Robinson) and others are overpraised (Kay is not really Tolkien’s equal, except in annual sales, at least not yet), but think about it: van Vogt is indisputably one of the formative forces in ghetto SF of the “Golden Age” 1940s; Cronenberg’s Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers make a body of F&SF film second only, if at all, to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and 2001 and The Shining; Gold’s editorial work was second only to that of John W. Campbell in determining the directions of SF; Shatner (with the help of Ron Goulart) actually can write a serviceable novel or two; Vonarburg was the first person outside France (and the first woman) to win France’s annual SF award; etc. Think of the poetry (Atwood, Gotlieb, Service)! Think of the humor (Leacock, Robinson)! Think of the movies (Cronenberg, Kinsella’s Field of Dreams)! And maybe think about folks you never thought of before. Consult this book.

[A] the challenge of finding a suitable means to examine the 'postmodern condition' has produced a vigorous and highly energized response from a new breed of SF authors who combine scientific know-how with aesthetic innovation . . . [B] aesthetically radical SF exhibiting many of the features associated with postmodernism are evident as early as the mid-1950s and early 1960s, when literary mavericks like Alfred Bester, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pynchon began publishing books that self-consciously operated on the fringes of SF and the literary avant-garde. [C] During the 1970s and 1980s [writers such as Don DeLillo, Ted Mooney, Joseph McElroy, Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood, William T. Vollman, Kathy Acker, and Mark Leyner], [w]hile writing outside the commercial SF publishing scene . . . produced works that perfectly fulfill the generic task of SF, described by Vivian Sobchack as 'the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of "being in the world"' [D] . . . these mainstream novels (recently dubbed 'slipstream' novels by cyberpunk theoretician Bruce Sterling) typically portrayed individuals awash in a sea of technological change, information overload, and random--but extraordinarily vivid--sensory stimulations."(McCaffery 9-10)

And so on. [A] (the guide letters are my insertions) ain’t quite right. The new breed of SF writers with technical know-how typically doesn’t write cyberpunk or anything remotely like it: David Brin, Robert Forward, James Hogan. And on the other prosthesis, Gibson is famous for having been inspired to write Neuromancer by watching folks in video arcades; he’d never even touched a computer before writing THE BOOK. But there are confirming examples: Rudy Rucker (mentioned by McCaffery) and, by some definitions, Gregory Benford (unmentioned).

[A] and [B] are mutually inconsistent. But, hey, postmodernism frees us from history, right, Bucky?

[B] is the giveaway: no distinctions made between Bester and Burroughs, Dick and Pynchon. But where oh where is Stanislaw Lem? What happened to Kobo Abe? McCaffery’s implicit polemic: there is a theory (mostly francophone but with some anglophones connected via conference calling) to support a world-wide (North Atlantic) movement that transcends genre (like SF or mainstream) and Genre (like fiction and music). Cyberpunk is its bleeding pump (speaking of Kubrick, anyone remember A Clockwork Orange?) and postmodernism is its daytime name.

[C] don’t have no SF writers. Mainstreamers trip in the ghetto, but do the ghettees ever wash in the mainstream? Sure: Abe, Lem, George Lucas (of American Graffiti), Lewis Shiner (of Slam), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (of late). But McCaffery ignores ’em ’cause they don’t help the cause. The original cyberpunkers–Gibson, Shiner, Sterling, et al.– were for a while called The Movement. McCaffery’s cause? To convince us that The Movement is the movement.

[D]: the slipstream is Pierian. And the rest of the “casebook” (poor Gibson hero that he is, that hard Case: he gets used by every slash body) sets out to do it.

Five sections, very nice: Introduction, Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio, Fiction and Poetry, Non-Fiction, Bibliography.

Zhuangzi say, “The Introduction is the most useful part of the book.” (Maybe that’s why Russell Potter assigns this one in his course called “The Transit of the Fantastic: From the Gothic to the Postmodern”). McCaffery writes with the clash and bristle of the slipstream and takes us through a plausible polemic about the conflation of MTV, fragmented fiction, decentered subjects, artificial bodies, and soft machines, and about the need for a new fiction in Third Stage Capitalism (Frederic Jameson is always right). It’s a trip and a half and you come back either truly believing (tant pis) or really juiced to think about all this stuff. (I’ll take what’s behind door number two.)

The “schematic guide” is “a quick list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape cyberpunk ideology and aesthetics, along with the books by the cyberpunks themselves, in roughly chronological order” (17). Every “artifact” gets its paragraph blast (blurb is too weak a word). The paragraphs do not connect logically. Does anyone still care? They connect imagistically. Frankenstein (for brooding sexuality and love of body parts). Red Harvest (noir is noir). Society of the Spectacle (’cause they do theory right). Dub Music (duh). Never Mind the Bollocks (so that is the Sex Pistols’ best album!). Dawn of the Dead (so cannibalism, so?). MTV (how not?). Big Science (and here is Laurie Anderson when we need her). And so on. For more than a dozen pages. If you think you missed something on the way from George Eliot to George Romero, McCaffery in under half an hour will let you know what you might want to back and fill up on.

Then comes the Fiction and Poetry anthology. Some of the short stories are finds (Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On”), and most of the pieces taken from books (as about two-thirds are) are cleverly enough extracted to be okay for tasting, but overall, what can you do with this collage? I’ve got it! Let’s give it to a lit class. You know, the kind that can’t read whole books? Nah. Better: let’s put it on reserve. Collage might work for postmodern artists but it doesn’t work here as postmodern crit. Nice touch, though: half the folks represented are “slipstreamers” and half SFers. The polemic rocks on.

No SFers in the Non-Fiction anthology, though, except for McCaffery’s interview with Gibson and Sterling’s “Preface” to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. (There are others, you know, like Norman Spinrad.) This time we get more complete works, some of them quite useful, like Darko Suvin’s solid “On Gibson and Cyberpunk” and Takayuki Tatsumi’s fascinating “The Japanese Reflection of Mirrorshades” and George Slusser’s wide-ranging “Literary MTV.” But you know that urban legend making the rounds, the one about the guy in a strange city who thinks he’s “getting lucky” but wakes up two days later drug-muzzy and with a tiny band-aid on his back? They stole his kidney! It’s cyberpunk on the streets. Well, the Big Names in this book need to feel their backs. McCaffery has extracts from Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, et al.

I’ve got it! Let’s put it on reserve.

Funny, isn’t it, that with all this theorizing in French, all the fiction and poetry is in English? Hey, David, tell this guy about Elisabeth Vonarburg.

And the Bibliography will keep you reading for years, if the imagistic polemic has you swinging that way.

So, this was a compilable book. And I, for one, enjoy it: another day, another dollop.

Ketterer’s book you can read when you need to; McCaffery’s when you want to. They both well repay dipping, each “after his kind” (Genesis 7:14).

“The Heat Death of the Universe” (Pamela Zoline, 1967) is a postmodern, cyberpunk fiction (that no one ever called those names) in fifty-four numbered paragraphs (just like a PMC review) that run a shining riff on housework and entropy. Here is number 2:

Imagine a pale blue morning sky, almost green with clouds only at the rims. The earth rolls and the sun appears to mount, mountains erode, fruits decay, the Foraminifera adds another chamber to its shell, babies' fingernails grow as does the hair of the dead in their graves, and in egg timers the sands fall and the eggs cook on.

I wonder what criticism will look like in ten years?

September 25, 2013
Risk and the New Modernity
Simon Carter

MRC Medical Sociology Unit
Glasgow, United Kingdom
isb002@lancaster.ac.uk

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992.

At 0123 hours (Soviet European Time) on Saturday 26 of April 1986, reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, rupturing the reaction vessel and causing major structural damage to the plant buildings. The subsequent release of radioactive material caused acute radiation sickness in 200 individuals, 28 of whom subsequently died (Spivak 1992). The immediate effects of the catastrophe were therefore comparable to a minor air disaster, yet the possible long-term consequences went far beyond those suggested by such a comparison. A plume of radio-nuclides (i.e. strontium-90, iodine-131, and caesium-137) spread westwards over Europe presenting a danger that was invisible and therefore beyond direct human powers of perception. As a result, those living within “fallout” zones became aware that they might be suffering irreversible damage but, at the same time, they were dependent on the knowledge of “experts” to find out–a knowledge that was mediated through institutions, argument and causal interpretations and was therefore “open to a social process of definition” (Beck 88).

The Chernobyl tragedy is just one, albeit particularly dramatic, example taken from a long list of other “invisible risks” in which the danger posed is socially disputable. For example, from within the nuclear economy we could add the names Windscale (now renamed Sellafield), Kyshtym, Three Mile Island and Oak Ridge and, moving outside this domain, we could point to concerns over food additives, pesticides, ozone depletion, air and water pollution, and AIDS. The project that Ulrich Beck has set himself is to ask what a society may look like in which disputes about these “new risks” are increasingly pushed to the fore?

Beck’s thesis is, however, more than just another sociological or anthropological examination of the breaks and shifts in the meaning attached to risk, within or between cultures (for an account of this type see Douglas and Wildavsky). The full title of Beck’s newly translated book is Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (originally published in German as Risikogesellshaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, 1986) and the title resonates with the central theme of his work–that we are in a period of transition not towards postmodernity but towards a second modernity in which the logic of industrial production and distribution (i.e. wealth) is becoming increasingly tied to the logic of “the social production of risk.” As he says:

Just as modernisation dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernisation today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being.(10)

In the first modernity, or industrial society, concerns focused on the distribution of wealth but, according to Beck, as material inadequacy was reduced, or at least isolated, we moved to a more complex modernity, or risk society, where consideration has to be given to the distribution of risks–a move from class position to risk position, from underproduction of goods to overproduction of harm. These are qualitatively different conditions. In the former, one is dealing with “desirable items in scarcity” but in the latter, where it is a question of the risks produced by modernisation, one has an undesirable abundance. “The positive logic of acquisition contrasts with a negative logic of disposition, avoidance, denial, and reinterpretation” (26).

Of course it could be argued that industrial society has always been engaged in a contest with risk and danger. Yet these risks were construed as external to the project of modernity. Thus a distinction was drawn between civilisation (safe) and nature (dangerous). Scientific rationality sought to put into discourse those dangerous spaces and therefore make them predictable–in short to “tame” chance (see Hacking). Beck’s point is that the externalisation of risk is no longer possible because it is increasingly apparent that many hazards are a by-product of the same techno-scientific rationality that initially promised progress, development, and safety. Today’s risks are yesterday’s rational settlements (and here we could cite all forms of pollution, including nuclear fallout).

Within the risk society, though, risk is distributed according to a dual process. On the one hand, the traditional inequalities of strata and class in the West are broken up by the “boomerang effect,” whereby “sooner or later the risks also catch up with those who produce or profit from them” (37). And while this may primarily entail a threat to life and limb it can also “affect secondary media, money, property and legitimation” (38). On the other hand, new international inequalities are established by the industrialised states attempting to export their risks to the third world. Here Beck points to the accident at a chemical production plant in the Indian city of Bhopal and the selling abroad, in developing countries, of pesticides. “There is a systematic attraction between extreme poverty and extreme risk” (41). But even here, ultimately, the boomerang effect strikes back at the source of risk (for instance in the importation of cheap foodstuffs contaminated with Western pesticides). The risks of modernisation, therefore, undermine the bounds of the nation state as established in the industrial society. Risk societies “contain within themselves a grass-roots developmental dynamics that destroys boundaries” (47).

For Beck these developments have implications for our conception of identity. In particular, he suggests many of the traditions and ideas of the enlightenment are breaking down–the old “truths” no longer hold. He sums this up simply in the following section:

To put it bluntly, in class positions being determines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness (knowledge) determines being. Crucial for this is the type of knowledge, specifically the lack of personal experience and the depth of dependency on knowledge, which surrounds all dimensions of defining hazards.(53)

For instance, within the industrial or class society, the threatening potential is knowable (i.e. the loss of one’s job) without any special cognitive means, “measuring procedures,” or consideration of tolerance thresholds. “The affliction is clear and in that sense independent of knowledge” (53). Yet within the risk society the situation is reversed. Those who are victimised–by, say, pesticide contamination–cannot determine their status by their own cognitive means and experiences. Within this new situation “the extent . . . of people’s endangerment [is] fundamentally dependent on external knowledge” (53). But, as we saw above, the externalisation of risk knowledge, into the hands of risk experts, is a social process thwarted by public disputes and disagreements between experts and public and among the experts themselves. The relationship between cause and effect, so central to scientific rationality, is suspended.

But this leads to a situation in which the very divide between expert and non-expert becomes turbid and amorphous. Those people living with “invisible” hazards “bang their heads against the walls of scientific denials of the existence of modernisation risks” (61). This leads to what Beck characterises as a learning process in which victims no longer believe risks to be acts of fate. Elsewhere, Beck has illustrated this process by describing the way in which those who are suffering are required to demonstrate “that they are sick and what has made them sick . . . and in an inversion of the normal legal process, are obliged to provide proof of poisoning themselves” (100). These people become “small, private alternative experts in the risks of modernisation” (61).

This, in some ways, is similar to an argument put forward by Patton in relation to those people living with AIDS. In earlier stages of history those people suffering from illness were largely silenced by the knowledge formations which establish an unreachable boundary around scientific medical “wisdom.” But the advent of the AIDS epidemic has led activists, at least in the United States, to themselves gain considerable medical proficiency. The circulation of newsletters and self help books provides information about clinical trials, including criteria of inclusion and exclusion, to those people living with AIDS. In addition, “underground” drug trials, using experimental products ordered through offshore pharmaceutical companies, have become established in some communities. As Patton says “it is the medical knowledge of the person living with HIV/AIDS . . . which has become today’s ticket to experimental treatments” (52).

This period of acute uncertainty and risk, in which the promises of techno-science are seen to have failed, may lead one to suspect that Beck has a pessimistic and bleak view of our future. But Beck is an optimist and this is expressed in what he sees as the possible potential of the learning process. It may now be that risks are no longer accepted passively by those who have to live with them. In his recent extensive commentary on Beck’s work, Lash has summarised this process of reflexive modernisation. Of course, the first modernity, or industrial society, by definition was reflexive. Yet there are, among others, two possible forms of reflexivity: it can be the self-monitoring of a social system or, on the other hand, a self-monitoring by individuals. The industrial society would “consist of a mixture of self-monitored (and modern) and heteronomously monitored (or traditional) spheres of social life. Beck’s second modernity would then be much more consistently reflexive” (Lash 5). This reflexive modernisation, rather than constituting a rejection of rationality is instead an embracing of a radicalised rationality. As Beck sums the process up:

In contrast to all earlier epochs (including industrial society), the risk society is characterised essentially by a lack: the impossibility of an external attribution of hazards. In other words, risks depend on decisions; they are industrially produced and in this sense politically reflexive. While all earlier cultures and phases of social development confronted threats in various ways, society is confronted by itself through its dealings with risks. . . . This means that the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but perfect mastery over nature; not what eludes the human grasp but the system of norms and objective constraints established with the industrial epoch.(183)

Now for some criticisms. A good place to begin may be Beck’s style. His book can only be described as a gradual slide from topic to topic in which one is never sure if one is reading a conclusion or an opening announcement. He makes statements on one page, only to then, apparently, contradict them a few pages later (but one is never totally sure.) While some writers, labelled as postmodernist, intentionally use similar devices in order playfully to resist the illusion of perfect textual coherence and univocity, with Beck one is less confident that one is being deliberately exercised.

For example, one of the difficulties in conceptualising the term “risk” is that the it can mean very different things in different contexts. Thus, in Beck’s argument we have, among others, two models of risk. On the one hand, within the industrial society we have those scientific understandings of risk which seek to “objectively measure” and quantify risk while, on the other hand, within the “risk society” such an objective measurement of risk increasingly becomes exposed as socially disputable–a move from risk as “object” to risk as “social process,” from knowable to unknowable risk. Added to this could be a series of less well defined and colloquial uses of the word risk (ranging from lay epidemiology to fatalistic and mystical interpretations of danger.) Hence, within Beck’s account, one word–“risk”–becomes overloaded with a plethora of often opposed meanings, and this gives his text a certain blurriness at just the point where one would hope it to be clear.

To be fair to Beck, this same problem is found in much of the literature on risk, a good deal of which is even less helpful than he is in defining its central term. Also, at a more general level, it does seem that Beck is, at least partially, aware of the amorphous nature of his book, as he claims that this work represents, more than anything, a personal process and admits that “the noise of wrestling sometimes resounds in this book” (9). In this respect he compares himself to a nineteenth-century observer who is on the “lookout for the contours of the as yet unknown industrial age” (9).

Yet the structure of his book does leave certain sections “out on a limb.” In chapter 4, for example, which concerns gender relations, Beck argues that men have practised a rhetoric of equality, without matching their words with deeds. On both sides, he says, the ice of illusions has grown thin; with the equalisation of the prerequisites (in education and law) the positions of men and women become more unequal, more conscious, and less legitimated (104). While it is good to see a male social theorist giving serious attention to questions of gender, it is not fully clear how this chapter is built into, or relates to, the rest of his thesis. Indeed, in his shorter articles on risk society, Beck scarcely mentions gender at all.

One can also criticise certain parts of Beck’s argument. For Beck, we are at the point of transition between two historical epochs–between the industrial and the risk society. Yet he does not adequately deal with how far along this transition we have passed. In this respect his vision of a new modernity appears somewhat illusory. For instance, his claim that the industrial society has brought about a reduction in material inadequacy cannot sit well with the experiences of many living in the deprived areas of any large city or substantial sections of the third world population. And the boomerang effect of risk re-distribution has a long way to go before there is any real equalisation of risk distributions. To give one example, we are all exposed to a certain level of “engineered radioactivity,” and catastrophes such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island demonstrate that radioactivity, in these cases, does not very faithfully respect the class or wealth of its victims. Nevertheless, in most cases it is easy to identify systematic unevenness in the distribution of risk exposures. Recent studies of cancer “hot spots” linked with the workers at nuclear plants and their children (see Epstein, also Gardner et al.) have shown that risks may still be localised to particular geographic spaces or specific groups.

And Beck’s optimism about the prospects of a radicalised rationality does not even serve to dispel his own empirical evidence of reasons why we should all be gloomy about prospects for the future. On the next to last page of the book Beck outlines some practical steps towards a reflexive modernisation: Only when medicine opposes medicine, nuclear physics opposes nuclear physics, human genetics opposes human genetics or information technology opposes information technology can the future that is brewed up in the test-tube become intelligible and evaluable for the outside world (234). This might be a reasonable starting point, but there is little evidence that anything like this is about to happen. As Bauman has observed, in commenting on Beck’s work:

And yet we are told repeatedly that it is the same science (in company with technology, its executive arm) who brought us here, who will get us out. Science has made all this mess, science will clear it. But why should we trust it now, when we know where the past assurances have led us?(25)

Yet, having said all this, I would stress that Beck’s work is well worth examining–and not just by those interested in the sociology of risk, but by anyone with an interest in social theory and politics. While his claim that we are entering a new risk society may be premature, I think that, at a restricted local level, we may be seeing a reflexive modernisation as specific risks become politicised by certain social actors (in particular by the new social movements or associations).

In terms of a social understanding of risk, Beck’s book represents a novel and innovative contribution to a field of enquiry that has become somewhat stale in recent years. It is a field largely dominated by cognitive psychologists (see, for example, Slovic et al., or Tversky and Kahneman), and I must agree with Beck’s assessment of cognitive psychological work on risk when he ironically describes the way these researchers view the lay public:

They [the public] are ignorant, of course, but well intentioned; hard-working, but without a clue. In this view, the population is composed of nothing but would-be engineers, who do not yet possess sufficient knowledge. They only need be stuffed full of technical details, and then they will share the experts' viewpoint.(58)

There is no such condescension in Beck’s Risk Society, which, whatever its weaknesses, is an engaging and provocative book. At the very least it provides us with some new formulations and some fresh terms to bring to bear on debates about “development,” “progress,” and the risks that attend them.

Works Cited
- Bauman, Z. “The Solution as problem.” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 November 1992.
- Beck, U. “On The Way to the Industrial Risk-Society? Outline of an Argument.” Thesis Eleven (1989): 86-103.
- Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. Risk and Culture: an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1983.
- Epstein, P.R. “Soviet nuclear mishaps pre-Chernobyl.” The Lancet (1993): 341, 346.
- Gardner, M.J., Hall, J., & Downes, S. “Follow up study of the children born to mother resident in Seascale, West Cumbria.” British Medical Journal 295 (1987): 822-827.
- Hacking, I. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
- Lash, S. “Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension.” Theory Culture & Society 10 (1993): 1-23.
- Patton, C. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge. 1990.
- Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. “Facts and Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk.” Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough? Ed. R.C. Schwing & W. A. Albers. New York: Plenum Press, 1980.
- Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. “Perceived risk: psychological factors and social implications.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 376 (1981): 17-34.
- Spivak, L.I. “Psychiatric aspects of the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station.” European Journal of Psychiatry 6 (1992): 207-212.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases: Biases in Judgements reveal Some heuristics of Thinking Under Uncertainty.” Science 185 (1974): 1124-1131.
September 25, 2013
Playing With Clothes

Debra Silverman

Dept. of English
University of Southern California
dsilverm@scf.usc.edu

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.

In March, the women’s NCAA basketball championship was played in Atlanta, Georgia, and for the first time in many years the event was sold out. The sell-out warranted a lot of notice in the printed press and on the television news– the men’s tournament always sold out but women’s basketball had been all but neglected in the past few years. The rise of women’s basketball had already been making headlines in the Los Angeles Times, where a story on the women’s team at Stanford noted that the women’s games were frequently selling out this season while the men’s games were marked by numerous empty seats. According to the Times, fans are appreciating the new athleticism of female players, particularly of stars such as Texas Tech’s Sheryl Swoops, who has been said to run the fast break as well as any male player. But many sports writers and radio call-in jocks have been dismayed by the sudden popularity of the women’s sport and by the media attention it has received, proclaiming that too much TV time has been taken away from the male players. On one call-in program a male viewer complained, “It’s not as if we really want to watch a bunch of girls run around a basketball court.” It seems that men, players and sports aficionados alike, felt for the first time this season that their all-male space was being threatened. It was an anxious moment for men’s basketball.

But it has been an anxious cultural moment for women in the sport, as well. Another L.A. Times article, which appeared at the end of last year’s tournament, is symptomatic. Entitled “Lesbian Issue Stirs Discussion” (April 16, 1992), the article engages the all too familiar conflation of discussions of women athletes with discussions of sexual preference. The “Lesbian Issue” was precipitated by comments from Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland–her team rules include the mandate “no lesbians.” Julie Cart, Times staff writer, sets out to investigate the history of this mandate and the problematic relationship between women athletes and their perceived (homo)sexuality. Cart concludes that, “being perceived as a lesbian in the women’s sports world often carries the same stigma as being a lesbian.” The way in which one’s sexuality is perceived is just as potent as how one represents her own sexuality.

In an effort to confuse (or perhaps illuminate) the boundaries between “being” and “seeming,” women athletes have turned to traditional “feminine” tactics. Cart notes that “to counter the perception of lesbianism, some female athletes adopt compensatory behavior” (emphasis added). By femme-ing up, wearing make-up while competing and dressing in “ultra-feminine” clothing when not on the court, players have marked their (“seeming”) heterosexuality with a vengeance. Pat Griffin, a former basketball coach who currently conducts seminars on homophobia for collegiate sports programs, calls this compensation “hetero-sexy.” Indeed, there has been a longstanding tradition of making female athletes seem more like women and less like men. Cart turns to Mariah Burton Nelson, a former Stanford player, as confirmation of this tradition. When hired by the L.A. Dreams, one of the short-lived women’s pro teams, Nelson and her teammates were told to enter charm school. If we can judge by last year’s film A League of Their Own, these basketball players were not the first female athletes sent for etiquette lessons. In Penny Marshall’s film, set in the 1940’s, female baseball players learned to sip tea, to apply their make-up properly, and to play baseball in skirts. Such calculated displays of “femininity” were meant to combat the spectacle of the masculine woman.

One might wonder why a review of Marjorie Garber’s excellent and comprehensive study Vested Interests begins with a discussion of women’s basketball. On the surface, it seems that what we have is a simple example of machismo–the desire that men’s space be men’s space and that women not confuse the issue by playing sports. Nor should women ever confuse or challenge gender expectations–it is not expected or widely accepted that women should desire a career in basketball. Simultaneously, we have a confirmation of the long standing acceptance of homophobia in our culture– spectators look past the performer, here a basketball player, to what might potentially go on in the locker room. I would like to argue a third possibility which intersects with Garber’s book. The women talked about in the Times article were women playing with drag–dressing up as women to make sure that they would not be (mis)taken for someone or something else. Rather than covering up gender, their drag performances displace sexuality. The femme, female athletes use the markers of femininity as expressions of self-representation; markers that culture can easily read. I also want to suggest that their dressing up, cross- dressing for societal consumption, creates many of the same anxieties that Garber examines and negotiates so well in Vested Interests.

Garber’s book is a combination of literary and cultural criticism. Its episodic and anecdotal moments work beautifully with theoretical interventions into discussions of postmodern gender configurations. Much like Donna Haraway’s ground breaking “A Cyborg Manifesto” which challenged the fixed nature of two terms, male and female, by introducing a third term, the cyborg, Garber’s theory insists on the discussion of three terms: male, female, and transvestite. In her analysis, the transvestite is not a side-effect of culture, an interesting thing to look past while being entertained. Her third term is the defining point of culture. As she writes in the introduction, “The ‘third’ is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge” (11). The third term–transvestite–throws gender categories into a state of “category crisis” which we must see as “not the exception but rather the ground of culture itself” (16). In other words, for Garber, crisis defines culture–and the transvestite figure defines the space of crisis negotiation, and hence of cultural re-definition or transformation.

Maneuvering her critical readings toward an examination of cultural anxiety about transvestites, Garber distinguishes her project from those which have preceded it. “The appeal of cross-dressing,” she observes, “is clearly related to its status as a sign of the constructedness of gender categories.”

But the tendency on the part of many critics has been to look through rather than at the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want instead to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders. To elide and erase--or to appropriate the transvestite for particular political and critical aims.(9)

Garber will insist on the third term as the marker of entry into the Symbolic, training her readers to look at the transvestite and read this figure as the site of cultural confusion and anxiety.

At its heart, Vested Interests is a book about blurred boundaries. Many things happen when we really look at a transvestite figure instead of incorporating its “mode of articulation” into comfortable categories of gender identification. Many boundaries are crossed. It becomes difficult or impossible to explain away the transvestite or fit the cross-dresser into a specific cultural niche. Garber continually reminds us that “transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male, and female, but the crisis of category itself” (17). In this respect, Garber’s position can be placed alongside Judith Butler’s theorization of identity in Gender Trouble (Routledge 1990). Both writers suggest that finding true identity is never fully possible as the truth is always already constructed by gendered expectations. In other words, it is not just about peeling back layers of clothing to find the truth of gender under the clothes. What is always at stake is what Butler calls the “parody” of the original, “[a] parodic proliferation [which] deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of its claim to naturalized or essentialized gender identities” (138).

Garber’s book is divided into two large sections, “Transvestite Logics,” which seeks to show “the way transvestism creates culture,” and “Transvestite Effects,” which explores how “culture creates transvestites” (16). “Transvestite Logics” is the more important half of the book. Here Garber establishes her theoretical parameters and sets her theories into place. But the entire book, which moves on a trajectory from the culturally and legally imposed rules of dress and behavior, to the ways in which these play themselves out in our need for the transvestite, is of considerable interest. Garber finds entertaining examples and compelling evidence for her theories in all corners of western culture–from the Shakespearean stage and medieval sumptuary laws to a cross-dressed Ken doll and Elvis’s clothes, from manuals for women on how to cross-dress as men to Madonna. The book is rich in beautiful photographs, drawings and film stills. Taken together, these many examples and illustrations highlight the problematic status of transvestite figures and confirm Garger’s argument that even in persecuting cross-dressers we express our fundamental dependence on them as the crisis points of cultural negotiation.

A brief tour of some chapters will suggest the main contours of this complex and involved book. “Transvestite Logics” begins with “Dress Codes, or the Theatricality of Difference,” which explores sumptuary laws in medieval and Renaissance England and their function in enforcing social hierarchy. In Elizabethan England gender and status confusion became fashionable, causing an official stigmatization of “excess” in clothing. This excess becomes the space of the transvestite. In the two subsequent sections, Garber investigates modern instances of cross-dressed Shakespeare using the actor Sir Laurence Olivier and actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt to offer the possibility that transvestite theater is the norm, rather than an aberration. Transvestite theater signifies impersonation itself, Garber argues, concluding that “there is no ground of Shakespeare that is not already cross-dressed” (40). All the world really is a stage. This initial staging sets the tone for a lot of what will follow. In part, Garber’s book is about excesses of all sorts–excessive behavior, excessive clothing styles, excessive masquerades and parades of gender confusions. It is about excessive body modifications and about pushing the limits of our everyday performances. Therefore, Garber’s point of entry, by way of a historical narrative/analysis of sumptuary laws, sets the scene(s) for the investigations that will follow. From the very outset, Garber urges us to read cultural staging and plotting in exciting and revealing ways.

“Spare Parts: The Surgical Construction of Gender” is a fascinating study of transsexualism, both female-to-male and male-to-female, using psychoanalytic theories in a discussion of male subjectivity. This chapter is particularly interesting when read with the question of excess in mind. To change one’s gender, to construct or deconstruct the proper parts, is a radical way to stage gender. Here Garber asserts that “the transvestite and the transsexual both define and problematize the entire concept of ‘male subjectivity’” (98). Since this subjectivity can be surgically constructed, Garber’s analysis obviously calls into question the viability of any essentialist orientation towards gender. If one can construct the gender s/he is, then the “natural” demarcations of difference (and desire) cannot in any sense be essential.

Garber’s assertion, in the introduction, that “to ignore the role played by homosexuality would be to risk a radical misunderstanding of the social and cultural implications of cross-dressing” (4) leads her to chapter six, “Breaking the Code: Transvestism and Gay Identity.” This chapter’s organizing caveat is the assertion that no matter how intertwined homosexuality and transvestism are, “neither can simply be transhistorically ‘decoded’ as a sign for the other” (131). The section “Transvestite Panic” uses Eve Sedgwick’s model of homosexual panic to describe the anxiety over the cross-dresser in gay society. Later, Garber examines the colonization of gay styles and sensibilities by straight society, using, as examples, the current vogue of camp and the eternal vogue of gay fashion and fashion designers.

“Transvestite Effects” turns its attention more firmly to popular culture. Chapters nine and eleven stand out in this section. “Religions Habits” (chapter 9) draws a connection between cross-dressing and religion. This is an interesting section on the perceived effeminacy of the Jew in various places and periods, as well as the relationship, often quite complicated, between the construction of the Jew and the construction of the male homosexual. “Black and White TV: Cross-dressing the Color Line” (chapter 11) discusses the question of race and the related subjects of minstrelsy and passing. This is an important and insightful chapter. Garber asserts that “the overdetermined presence of cross-dressing in so many Western configurations of black culture suggests some useful ways to interrogate notions of ‘stereotype’ and “cliche’” (268). With attention to these stereotypes, Garber artfully and intelligently delineates the ways in which “the use of elements of transvestism by black performers and artists as a strategy for economic, political and cultural achievement . . . marks the translation of a mode of oppression and stigmatization into a supple medium for social commentary and aesthetic power” (303).

Despite the many strengths of this book, there were two things about it that I found troublesome. The first is that Garber does not pay enough attention to women in drag. Her only extended discussion of how women fit into the analysis is in the chapter “Fetish Envy,” the briefest chapter of the book. Part of what Garber does here is use Madonna to explore the possibility of simultaneously having and not having a penis. Her conclusion: playing with these positions can be an empowering gesture. And certainly Garber is right to observe that when Madonna squeezes her crotch on stage it is funny and offensive precisely because it plays on the joke of having and not having–it mocks the Freudian desire for what is not there. But since this sort of female fetishism plays only a contributing role in Garber’s book, serving to extend or elaborate her theorizations of male transvestitism, the discussion of Madonna’s cultural role, and of female drag in general, is closed down all too quickly. Garber, it seems to me, is too willing to leave women on the margins of transvestite theory. And the result is that she has missed an opportunity to explore the sort of cultural terrain I began with–the staging of “femininity” by women whose threatening “masculinity” requires that they in effect perform in drag. Of course Garber had to place some kinds of limits on her research. But it is a decided weakness that her book has so little to say about women in drag, and that when it broaches the issue at all it is only to situate women in relation to the fetish, positioning them once again as the troubled objects of fetishism.

The second trouble spot was pointed out to me by a friend and grows out of what we see as a dangerous trajectory initiated by Garber’s sixth chapter. In a recent article, Eve Sedgwick remarks that “gender theory at this moment is talking incessantly about crossdressing in order never to have to talk about homosexuality.” Cross-dressing has been used to allude to gay male culture by an operation similar to the “open secret” of homosexuality: “everyone already knows” that cross-dressing and male homosexuality are intimately connected, so the fact of homosexuality can both be avoided and commented on through a discourse on transvestism. Sedgwick sees cross-dressing as a kind of veil or displacement, and the proliferating academic literature on cross-dressing as a discursive closet. I find Sedgwick’s position very persuasive. I also believe that if we are searching for a theory of cross-dressing as a truly effective transgressive practice, one of the most fruitful sites to examine would be the intersection of cross-dressing and gay political action. Clearly, this in itself would not solve the problem of academic or cultural displacement, but I find it troubling that Garber does not even look to these political spaces.

On March 31, 1993 Anji Xtravaganza died in New York from an AIDS-related liver disease. Anji was one of the queens featured in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning. On April 19, 1993, the New York Times ran an article both on Anji Xtravaganza and the New York drag world. Entitled “Film, Fame, Then Fade-Out: The Drag World in Collapse,” the article reports that numerous deaths have decimated the New York drag community. Simultaneously, the writer notes that drag has arrived in prime time; with the appearance of Dame Edna Everage on TV and Ru Paul on magazine covers, nobody need seek out the New York vogue houses. Middle-class Americans can watch drag performances from the comfort of their own living rooms. This would seem to indicate that Garber’s assertions about transvestite culture are true: there is nothing without the transvestite, the figure who confounds our sense of identity while at the same time constructing who we are. Describing the last days of Anji Xtravaganza, Jesse Green writes that the liver disease was “destroying [Anji’s] hard won femininity.” Green reports that near the end Anji had to stop taking the hormones which were inadvertantly helping the progress of the disease. Green notes, “In later pictures you can see the masculine lines of Angie’s [sic] face re-emerging despite the make-up.” For Green, there must always be something else behind the make-up which disease(s) can devastatingly reveal–there is inevitably a re-emergence of what Green reads as “true” identity. It is the strength of Garber’s book to make us aware of just how spurious this underlying or final truth really is–to show us that there is always something else behind the something else behind the make-up. What is always still underneath, and can never fully be revealed, is Anji’s most complex layer; neither a “true” nor a “made-up” identity, but a third term, that which both defies and defines Anji’s “masculinity” and “feminity.”

In Vested Interests Marjorie Garber has managed to traverse the spaces of this third term–some of the most difficult terrain in contemporary gender studies–with the style and grace of Sheryl Swoops leading a fast break, or Anji Xtravaganza sashaying down a runway. It’s a performance not to be missed.

September 25, 2013
Women and Television
Leslie Regan Shade

Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
shade@Ice.CC.McGill.CA

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

Spigel, Lynn, and Denise Mann, eds. Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1992.

In the past few years there has been a flurry of published work on women and television. Some of the books include: Gender Politics and MTV by Lisa A. Lewis; Women Watching Television by Andrea L. Press; the BFI collection Women Viewing Violence; Ann Gray’s Video Playtime; Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith; Elayne Rapping’s The Movie of the Week; and No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject by Martha Nochimson.

What most of these books have in common is a preoccupation with analyzing the multifaceted role of women as audiences in various televisual experiences, with many utilizing an ethnographic approach to contemporary situations. This tendency within cultural studies to concentrate on media audiences, and particularly non-elite audiences, has often led to overarching generalizations as to the shaping of subjectivity, audience interpretations, and subcultural resistance to the hegemonic order. Nonetheless, this purview has captured the attention of historians eager to examine working-class life, including the audiences of diverse cultural fare. As Susan Douglas has noted, though, very often we have too much theory without history, and too much history without theory. How then, can we get past this absence in the historical record and “admit that, short of seances, there are simply some questions about the colonization of consciousness that we can never answer. We are, for the most part, restricted to data generated by the producers, not the consumers, of popular culture” (Douglas 135).

What is a good strategy for conducting historical research on the impact and effect of media on audiences? What types of evidence are needed? Where can such artifactual evidence be mined? Carlo Ginzburg suggests that the historian’s knowledge is akin to that of the doctor’s in its reliance on indirect knowledge, “based on signs and scraps of evidence, conjectural” (24). Such a conjectural paradigm, Ginzburg believes, can be used to reconstruct cultural shifts and transformations. There is also the potential for understanding society, not by invoking claims to total systematic knowledge, but by paying attention to the seemingly insignificant, idiosyncratic and often illogical forms of disclosure. “Reality is opaque; but there are certain points–clues, signs–which allow us to decipher it” (29-30).

Lynn Spigel, for one, has made avowed use of Ginzburg’s tactic for following the seemingly inconsequential trace in order to render a significant pattern of past experiences. In her cultural history of the early integration of the television in the American home, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Spigel finds tell-tale evidence of the history of home spectators in discourses that “spoke of the placement of a chair, or the design of a television set in the room” (187). What she dubs a “patchwork history” consists in amassing evidence from popular media accounts that mostly catered to a white middle-class audience, such as representations in magazines, advertisements, newspapers, radio, film, and television. In particular, her insistence on treating women’s home magazines as valuable historical evidence allowed her to supplement traditional broadcast history (with its reliance on questions of industry, regulation, and technological invention), by highlighting the important role women assumed in the domestic, familial sphere as consumers, producers, and technological negotiators.

Spigel employs a diverse range of historical material to examine how television was represented in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the postwar period, such as the entrenchment of women within the domestic arena, the proliferation of the nuclear family sensibility amidst cold-war rhetoric, and the burgeoning spread of single-family homes in the new Levittowns. Some of the material she examines was culled from women’s magazines, industry trade journals, popular magazines, social scientific studies, the corporate records of the National Broadcasting Company, advertisements, and television programs.

In the first chapter, Spigel briefly examines past ideals for family entertainment and leisure, from the Victorian era to Post World War II. She argues that preexisting models of gender and generational hierarchy among family members, such as the distinction between the sexes and that of adults and children, and the separate spheres of public versus private, set the tone for television’s arrival into the home. As well, the introduction of entertainment machines into the household, including gramophones and the radio, also influenced television’s initial reception.

“Television in the Family Circle” is perhaps Spigel’s most successful chapter. Here she describes women’s home magazines of the time, including “Better Homes and Gardens,” “American Home,” “House Beautiful,” and “Ladies’ Home Journal,” which were the primary venue for debates on television and the family. They addressed their female audience, not just as passive consumers of television, but also as producers within the household. On the practical side, these magazines advised women on the proper architectural placement for the television set in the domestic space. The television set came to be seen as a valuable household object, becoming an electronic hearth that replaced the fireplace and the piano as the center of family attention.

Television was either greeted as the penultimate in technological advancement and as a “kind of household cement that promised to reassemble the splintered lives of families who had been separated during the war”(39); or as a kind of monster that threatened to dominate and wreak havoc on family togetherness. These diverse sentiments were echoed in the advertisements and discourses of the popular magazines of the day. A typical ad by RCA featured the family circle around the television console, while “Ladies’ Home Journal” dubbed a new disease, “telebugeye,” which afflicted the young couch potato.

“Women’s Work,” recounts how the television industry addressed women as consumers and workers within the domestic economy through advertisements and specialized programming. These discourses, addressed to “Mrs. Daytime Home Consumer,” included trying to hook the housewife on habitual daytime viewing through genres such as soaps and the segmented variety show featuring cooking and cleaning tips. Women’s magazines tried to mediate the dilemma housewives faced between television viewing as a leisure activity and their requisite domestic chores. One absurd solution to this predicament was epitomized by the Western-Holly Company’s 1952 design for a combined TV-stove, turning cooking into what Spigel calls a “spectator sport” (74).

The last two chapters deal with the emergence of television as the home entertainment center. In the new suburban landscape, television came to be seen as the “window onto the world,” and spectatorship became privatized and domesticated. Interior architecture reflected this relationship between the inside and the outside by promoting design elements such as landscape paintings, decorative wallpaper that featured nature or city-scapes, and the picture window or sliding glass door. Family sit-coms mimicked this fixation by depicting domestic spaces in which public exteriors could be glimpsed. As well, through various self-reflexive strategies, such as depicting television characters as real families “who just happened to live their lives on television” (158), and through farcical observations on the nature of the medium itself, viewers could be reassured about their relationship with this new electronic medium.

Spigel concludes by musing about current discourses on the contemporary home theater and the utopian possibilities raised by smart-TV’s, HDTV, the 500-channel universe of cable television, new video technology, digital sound systems, and virtual reality. She comments that the discursive strategies used to debate these new technologies are surprisingly the same as those used to discuss the introduction of television into the post-war economy.

Make Room for TV is interspersed throughout with reproductions from ads, cartoons, and television stills. Spigel’s work is an inspiration for those seeking to integrate diverse and unconventional source material into a coherent and plausible exploration of past audiences and the effects of new communications technologies.

Private Screenings, edited by Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, is an expanded version of a special issue of camera obscura that appeared in 1988, and it is also part of a camera obscura series brought out by the University of Minnesota Press. Other books in the series include the 1990 Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction and the recently released Male Trouble.

I, for one, was slightly disappointed to realize that except for the addition of three new essays, Private Screenings was a reprint of the camera obscura issue. Although the ability to easily purchase such revised editions is preferable to hunting down obscure copies of the journal in specialty bookstores and libraries, the question can still be raised as to the politics of publishing mostly reissued material. Lorraine Gamman commented on the prevalence of the feminist scholarly reprint, urging that publishers be pressured to reduce the prices of books that consist of mostly reissued material:

It seems likely that the live feminist scholarly reprint developed as a phenomenon not only because feminist thinkers are at last becoming recognized, but because it constitutes low-investment publishing. Obviously authors have their own reasons for authorizing the reissue of their work, and so it would be inappropriate to say that reprints constitute exploitation or simply another publishing scam. Yet in the rush to reprint the past, both publishers and authors should take care to ensure that feminism doesn't look like it has run out of new ideas or fresh ways to express them.(Gamman 124)

However, publishers also want to capture part of the relatively large photocopy audience. Important journal articles or special issues circulate through academe mainly in photocopied form, outside the publishers’ revenue loop, contravening copyright law.

The nine essays in Private Screenings provide several interesting cases of historical methodology, focusing on the relationship between women, television, and consumer culture, and are intended to be part of a larger feminist project of “close analysis and historical contextualization” (xiii) which Spigel and Mann believe is the panacea to prevalent theoretical generalizations about television. By paying close attention to the analysis of television texts and their historical frameworks, the editors hope that cultural differences in how heterogeneous groups in particular historical situations perceive various mass media will be more practically delineated.

Three recurrent themes are interwoven in the essays. The first is television’s appeal to women as consumers, either through its display of various lifestyles and commodities; or through the viewing of television programs. The second theme is memory: how did audiences understand television programs, and what kind of nostalgic function did television programs serve? The negotiation between Hollywood and the television industry is the third theme, whether in early programming where the recycling of Hollywood glitz was common, or through contemporary soap operas which imitate cinematic ploys.

What is most interesting is the diversity of historical material that the authors have gleaned, including archival footage of television shows and films, popular magazines, fanzines, market and demographic research, and viewer response mail. A variety of approaches for analyzing the material are employed by the authors, including historical and audience interpretations. The first four essays by Spigel, Mann, Lipsitz, and Haralovich, concerned with historical interpretations of television’s social and cultural function in the 1950s, are by far the most successful and convincing in the book.

Lynn Spigel’s essay, “Installing the Television Set” is an earlier and shorter version of Make Room for TV. In this condensation, the introduction of television into the social and domestic sphere is examined through investigation of a variety of popular discourses on television and domestic space, including the theatricalization of the home front.

A fitting follow-up is Denise Mann’s “The Spectacularization of Everyday Life” concerned with variety shows that featured Hollywood guest stars. For Mann, these formats epitomized the nostalgic return to both earlier entertainment forms such as burlesque and vaudeville, and to strategies utilized by the Hollywood publicity machine to engage women as ardent fans. Using “The Martha Raye Show” as an example, Mann argues that this transfer of Hollywood stars to the home through television eased the negotiation of Hollywood’s participation in television and its placement into the everyday mundane life of the housewife. Women were encouraged to enter into the fantasy world of television while being constantly reminded that the images were corporate-produced and commercially-sponsored.

George Lipsitz examines early subgenres of ethnic, working-class sitcoms in “The Meaning of Memory,” contending that this genre served important social and cultural functions beyond the economic imperatives of network television. Shows such as The Honeymooners and The Life of Riley portrayed an idyllic version of urban working-class life which tugged at the chords of nostalgia for the neo-suburbanites, as well as legitimating a change in the socioeconomic and cultural sphere occasioned by the shift from the depression-era to the post-war consumer consciousness of material goods.

In “Sit-coms and Suburbs,” Mary Beth Haralovich provides a fascinating analysis of the emergence of suburban housing, the consumer product industry, and market research, which operated as defining institutions for the new social and economic role of post-war women as homemakers. By considering the work of architectural historians Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright, she details the many ways that post-war housing development and design, spurred on by the priorities of the Federal Housing Administration, created homogeneous and socially stable communities which effectively excluded any group that wasn’t white and middle-class. Haralovich explores the ways that the consumer product industry tried to define the homemaker through intensive market research, such as employing “depth research” which would probe into the psychic motivations of consumers and allow for “new and improved” product design and packaging. Using the examples of the television shows Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, Haralovich shows how these representations of middle-class nuclear domesticity mediated the burgeoning suburban sensibility by inserting the preeminent homemakers June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson into the domestic architecture itself.

The next three articles in Private Screenings utilize archival material, such as viewer response mail sent to the producers of prime-time television shows, to look at how network television was dealing with the changing social roles fomenting in the 1960s, including feminism and civil rights.

Aniko Bodroghkozy in “Is This What You Mean by Color TV?” analyses public reaction to Julia, the first sitcom since the early 1950s to feature an African-American, Diahann Carroll, in its starring role. By concentrating on its reception, Bodroghkozy argues that “Julia functioned as a symptomatic text–symptomatic of the racial tensions and reconfigurations of its time” (144). Her tactics included analyzing viewer response mail, leading her to conclude that viewers were attempting to come to grips with racial difference; and by reading producer script files, she surmised that the production team constantly struggled to produce relevant images of African-Americans in the context of the civil rights movement.

The “new woman audience” that the networks were courting in the 1980s is the subject of D’Acci and Deming’s articles. D’Acci’s study of the police women genre show Cagney and Lacey led her to examine production files and interview the producers and writers to analyze the elaborate bargaining that ensued between the television producers, the network, the audience, critics, and public interest groups, relating this to the ongoing concerns of the women’s movement. She details how Cagney and Lacey struggled with the terms of femininity as it was played out on prime-time television–for instance, charges of lesbianism against the actors, problems with sexual harassment and the pain of the biological clock. Robert H. Deming is good when he argues that our interpretation of the “new women,” as exemplified by Kate and Allie, is contingent on our memories of sitcom women of the past, from ditzy gals like Lucy to goody- two-shoes like Mary Tyler Moore; but he is irritating when he tries to make a case for the program constructing and defining forms of female subjectivity.

The last two articles are concerned with contemporary television melodrama and the insertion of this “feminine” genre into a broad spectrum of programming. Sandy Flittermann-Lewis adopts a rather obtuse psychoanalytic- semiotic model to analysize how weddings are used in soap operas to contribute to the flow of narrative actions, concluding that they function as a return to the cinematic past. Lynne Joyrich examines the prevalence of the melodrama into diverse forms and textures of contemporary television, such as daytime soap operas, prime-time soaps, made-for-TV movies, crime dramatizations, and the growth of the therapeutic ethos. She maintains that “melodrama is thus an ideal form for postmodern culture and for television” (246), but I am not at all persuaded that such genres can, as she believes, “steel women for resistance” (247). Rather than reading melodramas against the grain and providing my own ironic commentaries, I would instead prefer to turn the set off.

On the practical side, the last chapter in Private Screenings is a “Source Guide to TV Family Comedy, Drama, and Serial Drama, 1946-1970” contained at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the Museum of Broadcasting, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications at River City. As well, William Lafferty has compiled a guide to alternative sources of television programming for research, including video dealers and the collectors market.

Works Cited
- Douglas, Susan J. “Notes Toward a History of Media Audiences.” Radical History Review 54 (1992): 127-38.
- Gamman, Lorraine. “Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just Seventeen and Schoolgirl Fiction” [book review]. Feminist Review 41 (Summer 1992): 121.
- Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9 (1990): 24.
September 25, 2013
Theorizing the Culture Wars
J. Russell Perkin

Department of English, Saint Mary’s University
Halifax, N.S., Canada
rperkin@science.stmarys.ca

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Spanos, William V. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests at the beginning of Loose Canons, the “political correctness debate” or “culture wars” came as something of a surprise to what Gates calls the cultural left. The right was first off the press with a series of books such as those by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, David Lehman, and Dinesh D’Souza. Progressive academics replied as best they could in a variety of media, from television to the popular press to academic articles. Now enough time has passed for responses at greater length, such as the three books I am reviewing here.

Since political terms are slippery at the best of times, but especially so in the context of debates about culture, I should begin by briefly explaining my use of the terms “conservative,” “left,” and “liberal.” This is additionally necessary because as a Canadian I would use these words somewhat differently to describe the political situation in my own country, and some of the subtleties of the American usage remain mysterious to me. I have tried to follow Gates in referring to people like Allan Bloom, William Bennett, and Roger Kimball as “the right,” “conservatives,” or sometimes, more specifically, “neoconservatives”–but I do not follow the usage of some on the cultural left who would also refer to them as “liberals” or “liberal humanists.” By the “cultural left” I mean the coalition of literary theorists, feminists, and scholars in various fields of ethnic studies who have reshaped the study of the humanities during the last fifteen years, and who are sometimes closely connected with movements for social change beyond the walls of the academy. The cultural left thus includes both liberal pluralists like Gerald Graff and those on the radical left like William Spanos. I have used the most elastic of all these terms, “liberal,” in two senses: first, joined with “pluralist” to refer to those intellectuals whose stance is to some degree oppositional, but who combine that stance with an allegiance to certain traditional humanist values, and second, as a political label in the narrow sense, to refer to views characteristic of the part of the Democratic Party generally described as its liberal wing. My main reason for not using the term in such a way that it would overlap with “conservative” is a strategic one: part of my argument is that the most promising way to defeat the conservative cultural initiatives of the last few years is to build a coalition between liberal and radical scholars who can work for change on a variety of fronts without needing to agree on every issue.

It would be easy for a Canadian academic to feel smug while contemplating some aspects of the culture wars that have been fought on campuses, on the air, and in the reviews and popular press in the United States in the last few years. Just as we sometimes feel smug–when looking south– about our national health care programme, we can point to the fact that our country is officially bilingual, and that multiculturalism is the law of the land under the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. We might also feel alternately amused and annoyed that amidst all of their theorizing of postmodern difference and of curricular change, American literary theorists still affirm the goal of shaping the American mind in a manner that strikes us as rather unselfconsciously nationalistic, especially when such theorists, as is often the case, are ignorant of the multicultural nature of Canadian society, writing as though multiculturalism were an American invention. But smugness is often misplaced. Our health care system has problems of its own; similarly, bilingualism and multiculturalism are among the most contentious political issues in Canada. Moreover, American academic politics have a way of spilling across the border, which is why as a Canadian professor of English I have taken a strong interest in the culture wars.

As an example of the way that the terms of the American dispute have been appropriated in Canada, I offer the following instance, which also suggests that controversies over political correctness are still being actively played out at the local level, even if they do not engage the national media quite as much as they did in 1991. At Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a Committee on Discriminatory Harassment earlier this year released an interim report on procedures to deal with harassment on campus. This led Jeremy Akerman, a former leader of the provincial (and social democratic) New Democratic Party, to write a diatribe entitled “Campus Crazies Are Too Close for Comfort” in a local weekly newspaper Metro Weekly 12-18 Feb. 1993: 7. Akerman writes a regular column under the heading “Straight Talk”). He based his warning about the possible consequences of the Dalhousie report largely on Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, which he describes as a “closely argued, well documented book” and “a work of courage and a beacon of common sense.” He also asserts that “University of Pennsylvania professor Houston Baker publicly argues against ‘reading and writing’ in the colleges because he claims they are a form of ‘control.’ Instead, he says the university should study the work of the racist rap group Niggers With Attitude, whose songs urge the desirability of violence against whites.”

In the context of public discourse at this level of ignorance, it is reassuring to be able to review a selection of intelligent assessments of the culture wars, and to evaluate some considered reflections about the nature of what Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux call “postmodern education.” I will begin with Gerald Graff’s book, since Graff has had a high public profile in debates over the curriculum, and since his book is, of the three I am discussing, the most specifically concerned with the question of what a progressive curriculum might look like. His subtitle, “How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education,” suggests that the book aims at the same popular audience who read Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. However, for the most part Graff avoids the nostalgic myths, the apocalyptic tone, and the patriotic fervour of such books. Instead he has written a modest defence of the strategy he has been tirelessly campaigning for over the last five years or so: the project of “teaching the conflicts,” that is, bringing out into the open, for the benefit of students, the issues that have been debated behind the scenes among the professors.

Graff makes effective use of personal narrative, including a fascinating account of his own resistance to reading at the beginning of his career as a student of literature, and throughout the book he shows great concern for what he calls the “struggling student.” He argues that discussion of pedagogy has stressed the sanctity of the individual classroom too much, without acknowledging that “how well one can teach depends not just on individual virtuosity but on the possibilities and limits imposed by the structure in which one works” (114). Thus he is concerned not so much with what texts students should read–in fact much of one chapter of the book is devoted to showing that Shakespeare still firmly holds pride of place in English studies–as with the way the curriculum is structured, and the concluding chapter looks in detail at several experiments in curricular integration.

By organizing the curriculum around conflicts of interpretation Graff proposes to provide students with “common experience” without at the same time assuming the need for a consensus on values and beliefs (178). Though he alludes throughout the book to his own political and social goals, it seems that for Graff, in the end, the conflicts themselves are what matters. That is, his is a liberal pluralist position, as he implies in the Preface when he thanks the conservatives with whom he takes issue throughout the book (x).

As I implied at the beginning of my discussion, there are some ways in which Graff’s book is not free from the aspirations of a Bloom or a Hirsch. In promising to “Revitalize” higher education he is implicitly buying into the very myth of fall and possible redemption that is typcially found in conservative texts. But Graff’s own critique of nostalgic myths of golden ages of education, here and in his influential Professing Literature (1987) runs counter to the implications of the word “revitalize,” and he also suggests that in fact “standards in higher education have actually risen rather than declined” (88, emphasis in original). In addition, he seems to underestimate the degree to which “the conflicts” are already part of the experience of education. As Gates comments about Graff’s proposal to teach the conflicts, “I think, at the better colleges, we do. We don’t seem to be able not to” (118). In spite of this, Beyond the Culture Wars presupposes that the university is in a state of crisis which Graff’s particular institutional proposals can repair. In fairness, I should note that it is possible that he adopted the strategy of employing some of the rhetoric of crisis simply in order to try to secure an audience for the book, which considering the sales of books from the right would be an understandable strategy.

In his last chapter, where he examines several experiments in curricular integration, Graff says that the proposals he endorses take for granted “the dynamics of modern academic professionalism and American democracy” (195). This is where I have the most serious difficulty with his argument. A more radical critique would surely want to at least question the ideology of academic professionalism, and to consider whether there was any disjunction between the noun “democracy” and the adjective “American.” As a scholar and critic who has been privileged to inhabit elite institutions, Graff seems to me insufficiently sensitive to the differences among institutions, and among the faculty employed by them on contracts of varying degrees of security and benefit. His tone throughout the book is that of someone who is comfortable in the academy, and who wants to make it a more interesting place for the privileged students who study there. The assumption is that there are principled differences among different professional factions, and these can be brought into productive conflict. Thus he does not seriously address the way that a corporate agenda is driving the university, so that the humanities are already situated within a frame of reference that is frequently reified as “economic reality.”

Graff expresses concern for the minority students who appear in his classes, but does not address the more fundamental fact that many young people from minority communities, especially African-Americans, do not have access to university education in the first place. Nor would his proposals make much sense to young and often marginalized faculty struggling to gain tenure, while older colleagues with tenure and seniority disdainfully refuse to engage in the sort of dialogue he assumes everyone seeks. But this is surely the reality for many at institutions less prestigious than Northwestern or Chicago. Finally, for all his concern for the struggling student, Graff seems to me insufficiently attentive to the diverse experience of students. Even though he talks interestingly about his own resistance to learning, he acknowledges that he was a middle-class kid at a good school; for students who are working class, especially in a recession, the “life of the mind stuff” Graff discusses may be even more alien. For such students, resistance is a way of registering that they are not destined for the kind of professional career the “life of the mind stuff” presupposes.

Henry Louis Gates’s book is a collection of essays, not all directly concerned with political correctness and the culture wars, although since their main focus is African-American studies they are very closely connected to those issues. However, as a result of his keen awareness of the way that the Reagan-Bush years affected African-Americans, Gates is less uniformly upbeat than Graff; in fact, his book is genuinely dialogic, incorporating a variety of tones and voices, and including a number of memorable personal narratives and two chapters in the mode of a hardboiled detective story. Due to the occasional nature of the essays, one can also see a development of Gates’s thought as it responds to particular events and contexts.

It is clear that for Henry Louis Gates the question of what books should be read is a much more important one than it is for Graff. Throughout the book he emphasizes the need to “comprehend the diversity of human culture” (xv). There is a celebratory tone to some of the essays, as he considers the achievements and the diversity of African-American studies, but at the same time an awareness of the precarious nature of this achievement, especially in view of the limited number of black doctoral graduates. He suggests that the more radical project remains, namely that of transforming the idea of what it means to be American so that it fully incorporates the African element of American culture.

Loose Canons is full of an infectious enthusiasm for the project of literary and cultural studies, and a profound awareness of Gates’s relation to a particular tradition and culture, even as he insists that education must strive for a culture without a centre, and one that accommodates difference. At the same time he rejects a simplistic identity politics, and he asserts that humanists need to learn to live without cultural nationalism (111). For Gates, “any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how ‘alien’ it may appear to be” (xv). The combination of an awareness of the isolating dangers of cultural nationalism and a desire to celebrate his own cultural tradition are particularly apparent in the discussion of the project of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature; few can have a keener sense than Gates of the force of the arguments on all sides of the canon debate.

At times Gates, like Graff, seems rather comfortable with his position in the academy, and seems to refrain from questioning some of its more problematic enabling assumptions. However, this is only one element from a variety of voices, and a personal anecdote makes it clear that comfort–for the distinguished black professor–is liable at any moment to turn to discomfort: “Nor can I help but feel some humiliation as I try to put a white person at ease in a dark place on campus at night, coming from nowhere, confronting that certain look of panic in his or her eyes, trying to think grand thoughts like Du Bois but– for the life of me–looking to him or her like Willie Horton” (135-36).

Gates tries to maintain a balance throughout the book between on the one hand asserting the importance of intellectual work, and on the other recognizing that the political and social significance of such work can be overestimated by those who engage in it. He doesn’t deny the importance of critical debate, but insists on the highly mediated relationship of such debate to its supposed referent. As he comments, “it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets” (19).

I will postpone discussion of the political position Gates take in his important final chapter until I have considered William Spanos, since I think that Gates provides an important corrective to Spanos’s analysis.

With The End of Education we enter a rather different world. Graff and Gates both write in an elegant straightforward English, largely free of technical theoretical language; much of the material in each book has its origin in material prepared originally for oral delivery or for publication in literary reviews rather than academic journals. It is also clear that the publishers are hoping that the books will appeal to an audience beyond the academy. Spanos, on the other hand, writes in a dense discourse owing much to Heidegger and Foucault, and in a tone of unqualified assertion, without any of the engaging personal voice of Graff or Gates. The words “panoptic” and “hegemony,” together or separately, occur with numbing insistency. To make matters worse, the book is printed with small margins in a small typeface, and with forty-seven pages of long footnotes. One of my colleagues, looking at the review copy lying on my desk, commented that this seems like the kind of book that gives you a headache to read. It is likely to be read only by committed postmodern theorists, which is unfortunate, because The End of Education is an important book, and one which in many ways makes a challenging and necessary critique not only of neoconservative humanism but of the structure and discourses of the university which, Spanos asserts, support and are reinforced by such humanism.

The book originates in a response Spanos wrote to the Harvard Core Curriculum Report of 1978. He developed this response into a manuscript which was rejected for publication by an Ivy League press in spite of favourable readers’ reports, because it seemed to that press politically inappropriate to publish a “destructive” critique of the ideology informing the Harvard Report. Some of the material was published during the 1980s in articles in boundary 2 and Cultural Critique, but the final version has obviously been overdetermined by the intervening culture wars, which in some ways vindicate Spanos’s critique of the Harvard Report, but in other ways, I think, qualify the political conclusions he draws, in ways that he does not want to recognize. I should repeat that I find The End of Education at once a difficult, brilliant, forceful, and maddening book. My view of it changed several times as I read it, and the critique that follows is, more than most reviews, a provisional response.

What is impressive about the book, after the essays of Graff and Gates, is the density of its documentation and the erudition of its theoretical argument. Because of this, and because of his relentlessly oppositional stance (Spanos is no liberal pluralist), the book is a far more radical questioning of the institutional structure of the American university, whose complicity–including that of the humanities–with the more repressive and militaristic aspects of American society he clearly documents. His use of Althusser and Foucault prevents the too easy acceptance of the ideology of academic professionalism that Graff and to some extent Gates can be charged with. Furthermore, the most general project of the book is a Heideggerian critique of Western humanism per se. The result is obviously a much more ambitious book than the other two, though at the present juncture it must be evaluated in the context of the political debate over the future of the humanities, since the culture wars have placed it in a more specific frame of reference than Spanos originally anticipated.

The End of Education operates on several levels. The most basic is the Heideggerian critique of the onto-theological tradition of Western humanism, of which the humanities in the modern university are one particular part, and for which the Harvard Report in turn is a particular, synecdochic example. Secondly, Spanos argues that Foucault’s critique of panopticism as a “Benthamite physics of power” is not restricted to scientific positivism, but can be applied to the humanities as well, and to liberal, pluralist humanists as much as to neoconservatives: Far from countering the interested rapacity of the power structure that would achieve hegemony over the planet and beyond, the Apollonian educational discourse and practice of modern humanism in fact exists to reproduce its means and ends (64). The only hope is a postmodern (or, as Spanos prefers, posthumanist), “destructive”–in the Heideggerian sense– coalition of Heideggerian ontological critique and a social critique deriving from Foucault and Althusser, leading to an oppositional politics in the academy.

The genealogy Spanos constructs is impressive, and later developments have certainly vindicated his view of the Harvard Report, which in the early 1980s might have seemed overly paranoid. Spanos clearly shows a pattern in the recurrence of general education programmes based on restricted canons, beginning with the period during and following the first world war, then during the cold war, and finally in the post-Vietnam period. His insistence on acknowledging the importance of the Vietnam war in discussing the humanities at the present time is an important act of cultural memory. As an uncovering of the motives impelling the right in the culture wars, this book should be required reading for oppositional critics. However, as a political intervention it is flawed in several important ways, and I will conclude this review with an account of these, and a suggestion by way of Henry Louis Gates of a less paranoid and more pragmatic strategy for the cultural left.

On the one hand, Spanos gives his book theoretical depth by beginning at the most basic level of the question of being. On the other hand, in purely rhetorical terms, many readers will probably find the juxtaposition of the heavily Heideggerian first chapter and the details of the Harvard Report to be catachrestical; it is hard for even a sympathetic reader to grant the enormous linkages and assumptions involved in the argument. If Spanos had let his Heideggerian approach inform his genealogy without feeling it necessary to include so many long quotations from Being and Time and other works, the book would have a wider rhetorical appeal and thus a potentially greater political effect.

Another problem is that the book makes huge historical assertions that have the effect of lessening difference, even while it attacks the metaphysical principle “that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around” (4; emphasis in original). This is something Spanos has in common with some followers of Derrida who turn deconstruction into a dogma, rather than realizing that it is a strategy of reading that must take account of the particular logic of the texts being read. Spanos asserts that the classical Greeks were characterized by “originative, differential, and errant thinking” (105), which every subsequent age, beginning with the Alexandrian Greek, through the Romans, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Victorians, and right up to the present, misunderstood in a reifying and imperialistic appropriation. This not only implies a somewhat simplistic reception-history of ancient Greek culture; it also, significantly, perpetuates a myth–the favourite American myth that Spanos in other contexts attacks in the book–of an original period of innocence, a fall, and the possibility of redemption.

There are further problems with the narrative built into The End of Education. Humanism is always and everywhere, for Spanos, panoptic, repressive, characterized by “the metaphysics of the centered circle,” which is repeatedly attacked by reference to the same overcited passage from Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”–not coincidentally one of the places where Derrida allows himself to make large claims unqualified by their derivation from reading a particular text. In order to make this assertion, Spanos must show that all apparent difference is in fact contained by the same old metaphysical discourse. Thus, within the space of four pages, in the context of making absolute claims about Western education (or thought, or theory), Spanos uses the following constructions:
1. “whatever its historically specific permutations,”
2. “despite the historically specific permutations,”
3. “Apparent historical dissimilarities,”
4. "Despite the historically specific ruptures."(12-15)
Western thought, he repeats, has “always reaffirmed a nostalgic and recuperative circuitous educational journey back to the origin” (15). This over-insistence suggests to me that Spanos is a poor reader of Derrida, for he is not attentive to difference at particular moments or within particular texts. He seems to believe that one can leap bodily out of the metaphysical tradition simply by compiling enough citations from Heidegger, whereas his rather anticlimactic final chapter shows, as Derrida recognizes more explicitly, that one cannot escape logocentrism simply by wishing to.

The destructive readings of particular humanist texts certainly show the complicity of Arnold, Babbitt, and Richards in beliefs and practices that are not now highly regarded (although Spanos has to work a lot harder with Richards to do this than with the other two). It is certainly true that Arnold made some unpleasant statements, and they are all on exhibition here. But Arnold was also an ironist, and the simple opposition between bad bourgeois mystified Matthew Arnold and good radical deconstructive Friedrich Nietzsche is too easy, as some recent work in Victorian studies on Arnold has begun to demonstrate. A deconstructive reading of Arnold would be alert to these possibilities, and would be able to argue, against William Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza, that Matthew Arnold amounts to more than the cliche, “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Such a deconstructive reading would be of more practical use in the academy at the present time than Spanos’s wholly negative destruction.

Spanos’s extensive reliance on Heidegger raises a political question that he doesn’t adequately face. The humanists are lambasted for every ethnocentricity that they committed; Babbitt, perhaps not without justification, is described as having embodied “a totalitarian ideology” (84). But the book is defensive and evasive on the topic of Heidegger’s political commitments. Spanos seems to think he can testily dismiss those who bring up this matter as enemies of posthumanism, and his treatment of the topic consists mainly in referring readers to an article he has published elsewhere. But the problem remains: Heidegger’s ontological critique, when translated into the political sphere, led him to espouse Nazi ideology. If Heidegger is to be praised as the thinker who effected the definitive radical break with humanism, surely the question of his politics should be faced directly in this book.

My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as I will note in conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems ill-informed about what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of composition studies. Spanos laments the “unwarranted neglect” (202) of the work of Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the last few years, I have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited. Spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked to the kind of discourse that first-year composition courses produce (this was Richard Ohmann’s argument); here again, however, Spanos is not up to date. For the last decade the field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows, and it is precisely that difference that neoconservatives want to erase.

By seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, Spanos seems to me to ensure his self-marginalization. For example, several times he includes pluralists like Wayne Booth and even Gerald Graff in lists of “humanists” that include William Bennett, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza. Of course, there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one that is counterproductive. In fact, I would even question the validity of calling shoddy and often inaccurate journalists like Kimball and D’Souza with the title “humanist intellectuals.” Henry Louis Gates’s final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position which Spanos has taken. Gates argues that the “hard” left’s opposition to liberalism is as mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to Cornel West’s remarks about the field of critical legal studies, “If you don’t build on liberalism, you build on air” (187). Building on air seems to me precisely what Spanos is recommending. Gates, on the other hand, criticizes “those massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as a jejune indulgence” (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left.

The irony is that in the last chapter, when he seeks to provide some suggestions for oppositional practice, Spanos can only recommend strategies which are already common in the academy, especially in women’s studies and composition. He praises the pedagogical theory of Paulo Freire, which as I have noted is hardly an original move; he recommends opposition to the structures of the disciplines, and oppositional practices within the curriculum. But again, many liberal as well as left academics are already teaching “against the grain,” enlarging the canon and experimenting with new methods of teaching. I have been teaching full-time for five years now, and the texts my younger colleagues and I teach, and the way we teach them, constitute something radically different from the course of studies during my own undergraduate and even graduate career. Women’s studies, which is not mentioned much in The End of Education, has provided a great deal of exciting interdisciplinary work. Gates’s book shows in detail how African-American studies has constituted not only an oppositional discourse, but one that has started to reconfigure the dominant discourse of American studies.

Thus Spanos seems to me to present, in the end, an unnecessarily bleak picture. It was surely the very success of some of the practices he advocates which precipitated the “anti-PC” backlash. The problem the cultural left faces is that books from the right have been hugely successful in the marketplace, with Camille Paglia as the latest star. But the vitality, scholarly depth, and careful argument that characterizes the books reviewed here show that the intellectual initiative remains with the left. These qualities also refute the wild allegations that have been made against current work in the humanities. Collectively, Graff, Gates, and Spanos suggest a way of moving beyond the culture wars, and I particularly recommend Gates’s final chapter as a careful and pragmatic analysis of the possible course of the humanities for the rest of this decade.
September 25, 2013
Comrade Gramsci’s Progeny
Tim Watson

Columbia University
tw22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Volume 1. Ed. Joseph Buttigieg. Trans. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Holub, Renate. Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992.

No self-respecting piece of work on Antonio Gramsci can fail to mention his famous letter of March 19, 1927 to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, in which he announces his desire to “accomplish something fur ewig [for eternity]” Letters 79). If Gramsci had been able to peer into the future and see the kind of work being carried out in his name in the Anglo-American academy over sixty years later, one wonders whether he wouldn’t have had second thoughts about that phrase.

Although Gramsci thought that cultural change tended to take place gradually rather than through “explosions” Prison Notebooks 129), it is hard to imagine what other word to use when surveying the proliferation of material around the figure of Gramsci in the last few years. From so-called “radical democracy” to subaltern studies to cultural studies, Gramsci’s name is evoked, his writings are endlessly analyzed, his legacy is contested (see, for example, Laclau and Mouffe; Golding; Chatterjee; Hall, Hard Road; Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler). The sheer volume of work, and its engagement across a wide range of fields and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, are no doubt testimony to the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s insights; they also suggest, however, that there is now a Gramsci industry–that within the academic market Gramsci represents significant currency, and writers (and publishers) are cashing in.

Given the institutional politics and economics governing the contemporary academy, these two observations (Gramsci as theoretical model, Gramsci as cultural capital) are inseparable; in this respect Gramsci is no different from other leading (dirigente, to use Gramsci’s own terminology) theorists: Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and the rest. Attempts to isolate and distill the essence of the “real” Gramsci (that which transcends the brash commercialism of the academic marketplace) can never be innocent or disinterested. Indeed, to dismiss the institutional economy within which one operates serves only to consolidate its regulatory mechanisms, its hegemony (so to speak). What follows is an attempt to address not the question “Who or what is the real Gramsci?” but rather the question “Why and in what ways have Gramsci’s writings enabled and generated so much intellectual work, insightful and mediocre?” Such a question is itself, of course, partly an effect of the Gramsci industry.

The subtitle to Renate Holub’s book, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (in the Routledge “Critics of the Twentieth Century” series), indicates some of the reasons why Gramsci has so much political and cultural purchase in the contemporary academy. It also reveals some of the ideological choices involved in the business of reading Gramsci: the book would undoubtedly not have made it this far if it had been called “Antonio Gramsci: Dead Sardinian Communist Militant,” for instance. If we unpack some of the assumptions behind Holub’s title we will find that Gramsci can be mobilized to the extent that he seems to offer political solutions to the predicament of postmodernism (figured as decentering, arbitrary, “merely” discursive), while at the same time appearing to surpass vulgar Marxist economism and historicism. To put it crudely, he is sufficiently Marxist to challenge postmodernism, and sufficiently postmodernist to combat Marxism. Shuttling between the two, the Gramscian writer enjoys great flexibility and space for critique, innoculated against the “worst excesses” of both systems of thought; the question remains, however, whether, in this “interregnum,” Gramsci can be used in this way without “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear[ing]” (Gramsci, Selections 276).

Gramsci and “Us”

Holub’s book is another “Introduction to Gramsci,” and as such, in an already crowded field, it has to differentiate itself and be seen to be offering something new and creative. Thus, she proposes to study Gramsci in the “context of literary criticism, and in the context of Marxist aesthetics” (7). “Until recently,” she observes, “the Gramscian critical community showed little interest in his literary critiques and his aesthetics” (4). In this way Holub carves out a space for herself in the contest over “a text [the Prison Notebooks] held zealously captive by the knights of the Gramscian Grail” (38). These knights (who are not identified) have thus far insisted on “emphasiz[ing] his place in the history of Western Marxism, [and] examin[ing] his conceptual apparatus in the context of political and social theory” (20); Holub prefers instead to build on the pioneering work of Giuliano Manacorda, who reads Gramsci as “speaking of the literary conditions of political possibility, correcting the image of a political Gramsci in favour of a Gramsci whose literary, aesthetic and linguistic interests give shape and form to his political interests” (38).

I do not mean to imply that such a reading of Gramsci is necessarily illegitimate; literary and culturalist readings of Gramsci are possible because there is evidence for them in his writings. (To cite a passage which Holub does not mention: “Every new civilization, as such … has always expressed itself in literary form before expressing itself in the life of the state. Indeed its literary expression has been the means with which it has created the intellectual and moral conditions for its expression in the legislature and the state” [Gramsci Cultural Writings, 117].) I am not interested in “correcting” the image of Gramsci which Holub propagates–even if one may question why, if “primarily he was a militant, [and] a critical and pragmatic one, to boot” (39)–she seems so irritated by those who choose to engage with Gramsci on that terrain. My concern here, rather, is how Gramsci works to legitimate a political project in Holub’s text, and the way in which, as the book progresses, the figure of Gramsci comes to be evacuated of almost all substance, so that “Gramsci” becomes a kind of cipher, merely a vehicle for addressing a contemporary crisis.

If Holub had stuck to the analysis of Gramsci in relation to Frankfurt School critical theory, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bloch which makes up the first half of the book, things might have been fine. Comparing Gramsci’s and these various theorists’ responses to modernity–rationalization, technologization, the culture industry–is an important task, and one which has for the most part not been undertaken up to now. Holub does indeed begin to demonstrate “the ways in which Gramsci’s work displays homologies with many pivotal twentieth-century ways of theorizing” (9).¹

But one gets the impression, reading Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, that the teleology of the book dictates that these discussions are entered into primarily as a pretext to get us into the present. Gramsci as modernist is interesting precisely to the extent that he can also be characterized as a postmodernist avant la lettre, as it were: “To deal with Gramsci, loosely, in the context of Frankfurt School critical theory, in the context of modernism, is apposite. It helps to examine the contours of Gramsci’s non-modernism as well, the ways in which he goes beyond modernism, and the possible applicability of some of his terms for a postmodern agenda” (14).

Thus there are multiple references to Gramsci’s “anticipatory sensibility to very complex cultural and social transformations” (10), or to the way in which “he begins to problematize, long before Edward Said and contemporary theories of progressive anthropology, the predominant Eurocentricity in disciplines and knowledge” (15). In his emphasis on “the materiality of language” Gramsci “surpasses the modernism of the Frankfurt School and aligns himself with or anticipates theoretical concerns which should become prominent in the second half of the twentieth century” (116); Gramsci’s linguistic theory represents “an advance over Volosinov’s” because it “anticipates a theoretical model” which can deal with “gender, race and geography rather than merely with class” (140).

The problem for Holub, however, is that these claims for Gramsci’s predictive capacity become increasingly removed from Gramsci’s writings themselves–unsurprisingly, perhaps, given their rootedness in 1920s and 30s Italian political culture. Hence the tortuous prose in the following passage, in which the reader is called on precisely to “reconstruct” Gramsci’s work in order to bring him up to date: “There are . . . some elements in his reading of Dante that lend themselves, due to their semiological and structuralist components, to reconstructing a version of Gramsci’s theory of the subject which brings him into the vicinity of other major twentieth century critics [here she mentions Merleau-Ponty, Volosinov, Barthes]” (119). At a certain point, Holub ceases to rely on the substance of Gramsci’s thought almost entirely, turning him into a methodological rather than a political model:

What we, living in a western nation-state at the end of the twentieth century, can adopt from Gramsci, I think, is not so much the results of his analysis, culminating in his particular theory of the intellectual. What we can examine are his ways of viewing and doing analysis, and amend or transform them for the political needs of our time.(171)

“We” Westerners emerge as a collectivity at this moment in the book, in contrast to the people of “Central and South America,” whose “socio-political and economic constellations . . . are at this point to some extent not dissimilar to those of Italy in the first few decades of this century,” and who thus can potentially make use of the substance of Gramsci’s work (171). We do theory, they do politics.² The “non- western world” remains undifferentiated and apparently unknowable for Holub (even the reference to Latin America has no specificity); its role is to provide the grounds for auto-critique, and thus for identity, for “us” (the first person plural is insistently present in the final pages of Holub’s text): “Our resistance to power, our critical thinking, must take into account our relation, as western intellectuals, to the non-western developing world, our position, that is, as producers and disseminators of knowledge, and meaning” (182).

It is undoubtedly the case that Western intellectuals need to be more attentive to their positionality and privilege vis-a-vis the Third World, and it is perhaps appropriate that a reading of Gramsci should stimulate such reflections, given his emphasis on uneven development, both within the European nation-state and through the operations of imperialism. The suspicion remains, however, that even as the locus of resistance shifts to the periphery, the Western intellectual retains for himself or herself the role of understanding, judging and representing that resistance.

Perhaps it is proper for us, as critical intellectuals and arbiters of hope, and stationed in the intellectual power apparatuses of the west, to seek out these impulses for democratic change, to receive the messages that meet us from these [`developing'] worlds, and translate them, by way of our theoretical tools, for ours.(189-90)

Such a position cannot avoid producing the “developing world” as raw material for the consolidation of “our” Western subjectivity; or, as Holub herself puts it, “the necessity of the `inferior other’ in the structuration of identity” (15). Thus Gramsci, stretched almost to the vanishing point by the end of this book, can be mobilized to legitimate the continuation of intellectual and political work in the Western academy, at a time when it is perceived to be under threat. Holub’s intervention, via the figure of Gramsci, can be read as an attempt to shore up the precarious but nonetheless powerful position of Western intellectuals “as mediators between the needs and desires of developing cultures, and the mandarins of our establishments” (189).

Gramsci and Cultural Studies

If such a reading of Holub’s work seems uncharitable, then I must have been infected by the deep cynicism underlying David Harris’s survey of British cultural studies, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. These effects, according to Harris, have been mostly deleterious; the energy of the “early rebellion” of British Gramscians has been “institutionalised and acedemicised” since then, so that the impetus for most current work in the field comes from the need to “found a research programme or school or centre, to engage in a little academic politics” (15). Thus, while Stuart Hall (or, rather, “the ubiquitous Stuart Hall” [xv]) argues that the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) demonstrated “heterodoxy and openness,” Harris contends that “beneath this pluralism lies a deeper conformity to a continuing project–the development and defence of gramscianism” (7), and that

this tendency is linked to the academic context of the production of these works: briefly, it is conventional in academic writing to conduct a debate with rivals before allowing the chosen theorist to emerge as the person most likely to synthesise the offerings, make sense of the debates, or offer some suitably pleasurable resolution and closure. This underlying narrative structure . . . might be called `academic realism.'(8)

Harris promises to share with us readers the “tricks of the trade” in this academic game (2), as he demonstrates to us the unity and continuity underlying “the specific twists and turns of the debates” within British cultural studies (8). If this is a survey work, intended primarily as a teaching tool (“I am especially interested in the student audience” [3]), then it is at least up front about its non-neutrality in the face of its subject matter. There is little doubt in Harris’s mind that in the trajectory charted by his title, the British Gramscians have taken part in a “demoralised flight from serious politics” (190) into the coziness of academic tenure and complacency.

Such cynicism is by no means entirely misplaced– although one might wonder at its motivation; given the hegemony currently enjoyed by “British cultural studies,” there is no doubt notoriety to be gained by attacking it. CCCS’s work in the seventies and early eighties did indeed demonstrate “the astonishing tendency for the figure of Gramsci to keep coming to the fore, as a leading theorist and guide, as a source of specific pieces or concepts which guide analysis, or less specifically as a kind of model of good practice, able always to `teach a lesson’, keep the faith, and see off rivals” (7-8). Later on, what Harris calls “gramscianism” certainly did seem to offer, as I suggested above, “a kind of `middle ground’ between fully floating discursive politics and more orthodox class politics” (45). Or, as the ubiquitous Stuart Hall put it, in the discussion period following his paper “The Toad in the Garden”: “Gramsci is where I stopped in the headlong rush into structuralism and theoreticism. At a certain point I stumbled over Gramsci, and I said, `Here and no further!’” (Hall “Discussion,” 69).³

But while academic and institutional pressures are undoubtedly a major factor in the reproduction and dissemination of any theoretical or political movement, such a movement is never reducible to those pressures. At times, Harris’s book ceases to be a sustained critique of a critical tradition, and drifts into academic point-scoring. Harris focuses on the ways in which Gramsci has served as a bulwark against threatening theoretical tendencies; what he fails to acknowledge is that such defensiveness does not preclude (indeed it may have actually facilitated) the production of important intellectual work. As an example, let me focus briefly on Harris’s reading of Policing the Crisis (96-104).

Harris recognizes the complexity and openness of the now classic 1978 study of the ways in which “moral panics” about crime serve to consolidate hegemonic state power: “there seems to be no stage-managed `discovery’ here [in Policing], at least, no premature reduction of the `complex unity’ to some easy slogan about hegemony” (102). However, this very complexity constitutes a problem for Harris: “the piece can look like a conventionally `balanced’ academic piece, riddled with cautious qualifications and reservations” (102).⁴ Some readers may recognize a trick of the trade in operation here in Harris’s text, viz. “a common academic desire to want it both ways” (102). Harris is suspicious of the authors of Policing when they claim to have “just moved, under the pressure of their own argument, from one level of analysis to the other as their discoveries unfolded,” arguing instead that “the authors had known for some while where they were going” (103); so does this mean that there is a stage-managed discovery after all?

While it is true that Harris could hardly be expected to “do justice” to a densely argued and expansive 400-page book in a short summary, nevertheless I think that Harris is enacting his own kind of closure when he argues that, of the possible audiences for Policing the Crisis, “it seems that `academics’ have received the most attention: all those asides and interventions in debates between different authors (and all those careful qualifications and reservations) are for them” (98). This is too easy a dismissal of a complex text–the mobilization of the idea of “academic realism,” if pushed far enough, can cease to be a revealing insight into the strategies which produce a discursive formation, and can become instead an alibi for failing to engage with the substance of that discourse.

We should be thankful to Harris for sharing his inside knowledge of the constraints and conventions of “academic realism,” not least because it will allow his student audience to decode his own strategies. Although “gramscianism” makes some sense as a concept in the context of British cultural studies through the mid-eighties, as the field has become more dispersed and contested (and as the prominence of Gramsci himself as a theorist has waned–the only field in which that could be said to be happening– “Largely . . . Gramsci now exists as a kind of source for handy and stylish quotes, phrases or metaphors” [191]), it makes less and less sense to talk of “gramscianism.” The question arises, then, to what extent the term functions primarily within the economy of Harris’s own text in order to hold his academic realist narrative together, particularly when it can encompass such writers as “[Robert] Hewison [who] is not a gramscian or a semiotician, in so far as it is possible to tell from his books, but . . . is clearly an informed critic, and, with the aid of a few specific concepts and a parachute for them, . . . could become a full gramscian should he so desire” (158). The wit and acerbity here will doubtless endear Harris to his student audience, but in the end one fears that it will encourage the dismissal of what, after all, is “one of the few critical traditions British academic life possesses” (6).

Gramsci’s Corpus

When it comes to writing about Gramsci, the academic realism which Harris anatomizes is almost always supplemented with a dose of tragic melodrama. Gramsci’s premature death in the Quisisana clinic in Rome in 1937, when he was finally freed from his prison sentence but physically incapable of leaving the prison hospital; his heroic struggle to defy the words of the chief prosecutor at his trial–“we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years”–by writing his prison notebooks, battling ill health and the inevitable lack of resources while incarcerated: among the ranks of Marxist martyrs only Rosa Luxemburg comes close to Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci’s biography, however, does not merely add that all-important romantic frisson to an otherwise dry academic discourse. His early death means that the body of his later work–the prison notebooks–remains unfinished, sketchy, provisional, and must therefore be actively reconstructed in the process of reading. The usual give and take of scholarly interpretation becomes, in the context of Gramsci studies, an unusually intense tussle over the Gramsci corpus. Gramsci died intestate, as it were; his legacy–the body of his writings–has been contested, sometimes bitterly, ever since.

The publication, finally, of a definitive English translation of the full text of the prison notebooks will not lay this conflict to rest. In the introduction to the first volume of what will eventually be a five or six volume edition of Gramsci’s prison writings, the editor, Joseph Buttigieg, himself acknowledges this fact:

The Gramscian editor, scholar, or commentator, then, feels compelled . . . to stitch [the pieces of Gramsci's text] together. Sometimes this operation of reconstruction is carried out responsibly, that is, with a critical awareness of its limitations. At other times, however, this operation is carried out with the misguided belief that one can actually reconstruct not just Gramsci's thought but Gramsci himself. . . . It would be futile to think that one can put an end to this game. Even the most conscientiously accurate and complete reproduction of Gramsci's manuscript will not settle the polemics, or still the urge to reconstruct the `true' Gramsci."(62-63)

However, English-speaking readers will now have a much better grasp of the sheer volume of material which must be sifted through in order to produce the nuggets of Gramscian gold with which we are all so familiar: hegemony, state and civil society, war of maneuver and war of position, passive revolution, the organic intellectual.

This new translation is based on the standard Italian edition of the Quaderni del carcere edited by Valentino Gerratana, except that the meticulously detailed textual apparatus appears in the same volume as the relevant text, rather than being reserved for a separate, final volume. A pedant would bemoan a number of typos and other proofreading errors which sit badly with the scholarliness of the enterprise; nevertheless, readers can only be grateful to Buttigieg and Columbia University Press (who are also publishing a complete English edition of Gramsci’s prison letters) for their endeavors.

The Buttigieg edition will not supplant the previous translated selections from Gramsci’s prison writings Selections, Cultural Writings), if only because its price and bulk will preclude its use as a teaching text for the most part. However, Buttigieg is right to say that its appeal will not be limited “only to the most scrupulous readers and assiduous researchers” (xix). Even a cursory reading of the “recondite materials” (xix) of Gramsci’s first two notebooks (translated in this volume) will provide the necessary innoculation against the worst excesses of the Gramsci industry: both the tendency to smooth out Gramsci’s writings in the search for a coherent philosophy, and the tendency to treat Gramsci’s text as so disjunctive as to be open to almost any interpretation.

The publication of this new translation would not have been possible without the support of a large Italian bank (whose generosity makes a pointed contrast with the “modest” assistance Buttigieg received from the NEH [xxi]). But the whole project is also clearly an effect of the Gramsci industry. A positive effect, and one for which we can be grateful–even if it means another decade of dubious “gramscianisms” and another generation of scholars claiming to be Gramsci’s postmodern heirs.

Notes

1. Both Holub and Harris make the point that theorists who write about Gramsci, or use his work, have consistently foreclosed or even dismissed critical theory (see Harris 15-16). Although I do not have the space to do more than gesture at a possible new direction here, I think a fruitful place to start might be a discussion of the issues raised by the striking similarity in imagery of Gramsci’s reference to Italian poet Alfieri having his servants tie him to his chair (so that he would have the self-discipline to work Prison Notebooks 236]), and Adorno and Horkheimer’s reference to Odysseus having himself tied to the mast (so that he might have pleasure from the Sirens’ song) while stopping the ears of his sailors, so that they could continue to labor for him (Adorno and Horkheimer 58-60).

2. Although a discussion of Laclau and Mouffe is beyond the scope of this paper, I would contend that a structurally similar argument fatally disables Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In the section “Equivalence and Difference,” they locate the logic of equivalence in the Third World, where “imperialist exploitation and the predominance of brutal and centralized forms of domination” produce “the division of the political space into [only] two fields” (131); they call this the realm of the “popular,” which they set against the “democratic,” associated with “advanced industrial societies” characterized by complexity and the logic of difference (130). Thus a surreptitious hierarchical account emerges, in which the Third World is parasitic on the West, the site of “hegemony”: “It is clear that the fundamental concept is that of `democratic struggle,’ and that popular struggles are merely specific conjunctures” (137).

3. On Stuart Hall’s use of Gramsci, in the context of Gramsci’s reception in Britain more generally, see David Forgacs, “Gramsci and Marxism in Britain,” New Left Review 176 (July- August 1989): 83-84.

4. The authors themselves, by contrast, worry in their introduction that “academics will find it Policing] too unbalanced, too committed” Policing ix).

Works Cited
- Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1991.
- Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?. London: Zed, 1985.
- Golding, Sue. Gramsci’s Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.
- Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. & trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
- Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Cultural Writings. Ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Trans. William Beolhower. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985.
- Gramsci, Antonio. Letters from Prison. Ed. & trans. Lynne Lawner. New York: Noonday, 1989.
- Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
- Hall, Stuart. “Discussion: The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
- Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978
- Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1985.
September 25, 2013
Can You Go Home Again? A Budapest Diary 1993

Susan Suleiman

Dept. of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature
Harvard University

Introductory Note:

The excerpts that follow are from a diary I have been keeping since early February [1993], when I began a six- month residency at the Collegium Budapest, a new Institute for Advanced Study modeled on those in Berlin and Princeton. When I was invited last year to come to Budapest during this inaugural year of the Collegium, I accepted immediately. Besides the usual luxuries of such a Fellowship period, the invitation offered me what I thought of as a near- providential opportunity to continue the autobiographical project I had started some years back, and which was assuming increasing urgency.

I left Hungary with my parents in the summer of 1949, and rarely thought of it again until thirty-five years later, when I decided to return as a tourist with my two sons, then aged 14 and 7. That return triggered a desire to reconnect with my childhood and native city, a desire that took the form of writing. I published two short pieces I occasionally allude to in the diary (“My War in Four Episodes,” Agni, 33, 1991; “Reading in Tongues,” Boston Review, May-August 1992). Then, as a preparation for my current trip, I wrote a longer memoir, still unpublished, about the 1984 return and the memories it brought back. The decision to write the diary did not crystallize until after I arrived here–I simply found myself writing on my computer, sometimes for hours, at other times for a few minutes, from the first day on. After a while, I realized that I was writing “for a public” as well as for myself, and the project of a published diary began to take shape. Since these excerpts have had to be radically excised from a much longer text that is still in process, I decided to limit my selections to a few themes, chief among them the current resurgence of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Hungary (as in Eastern Europe in general), and, not unrelated to the first, my personal history. Out of a desire to protect the privacy of people I mention, I have used only first names or initials, which are not necessarily factual. In the case of public figures, I cite their full real name. I have tried to keep the writing very close to that of the first draft, but have not resisted making occasional stylistic changes. The order and tenor of the entries have not been modified. Some of the major cuts are indicated by suspension points in brackets.

A few Hungarian words: utca means street, ut means avenue, ter means square (like “place” in French), korut is a round avenue, korter or korond a round “square,” villamos means tramway. Hungarian names are cited last name first, given name second. Hungarian vowels have a variety of diacritical marks, but they cannot be reproduced in this electronic publication.

I would be interested in readers’ responses to this work. Please send them to Postmodern Culture, which will forward them to me.

Wednesday, February 3

My apartment is the whole top floor of a three-story building, very big and nice.

[…] I didn’t want to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, so after taking a hot bath and changing clothes, I went to the Collegium. I walked part of the way, down toward the Gellert Hotel on Bartok Bela ut, a wide, busy avenue lined with shops. I stopped at one to buy a toothbrush and some paper handkerchiefs. It felt strange to be speaking Hungarian to the young woman in the store. I thought I was speaking badly, like a foreigner. After walking a while longer I took a taxi, which cost 240 Forints–just under three dollars.

The Collegium occupies a historical monument, an 18th- century building, newly renovated, in what is surely one of the most beautiful spots in Budapest–on Castle Hill above the Danube, across the square from the Matyas Church. The Church and square look positively dreamlike when they are lit up in the evening. My first sight of them was that way, for it was dark by the time I got there.

Friday, February 5

Had a chat with the downstairs neighbor this morning, a woman of about 65. She and her husband have been living in this house for over thirty years. It was a state-owned building, but three years ago the tenants were given the option to buy their apartments. The couple who own mine bought two–this one and a smaller one on the ground floor, where they now live. They spent several years abroad, which may account for the fancy electronic equipment in my apartment. Everybody had their place redone inside, but they have no money left to repair the outside, which still bears the marks of World War II. The front was just one street over, she said: Germans on one side, Russians on the other. The pockmarks on our facade are due to flying shrapnel. It looks very bad, but would cost too much to repair. There are six apartments in the building. Theirs was divided, that’s why it’s smaller than mine.

Shall I go back again to Akacfa utca and climb again the three flights of stairs to our old apartment, now divided? Maybe the couple who lived there nine years ago no longer lives there, or maybe they have bought the place and had it redone.

After lunch at the Collegium I took a taxi to the home of B., one of the editors of a recently founded monthly journal, whose name was on my list of people to call. He had told me on the telephone yesterday that he lived in an old-style building with a balcony surrounding the courtyard, and asked whether I was afraid of heights. No I wasn’t, I assured him–and a good thing, too, because really his balcony is very narrow and from the third floor where he lives one has a plunging view. The building reminded me of Akacfa utca, but it was less nice–narrow balcony, no wrought iron, a smallish courtyard full of parked cars.

The man who opened the door was tall, around 50, pleasant face, almost bald and what hair he had, white. The apartment’s clutter matched the exterior mess. He invited me into the tiny kitchen while he made coffee. He has a very charming, informal manner and a boyish air which I suspect he cultivates, as if he didn’t want to flaunt his authority or power–or perhaps as if he didn’t want completely to grow up. After the coffee was made, he invited me into his study, a large pleasant room lined with books which we reached by crossing a small bathroom. His computer was still on, and he showed me the database he has been working on for the past fifteen years, just finished: a complete repertoire, in French, of Hungarian poetry written before 1600. A true work of erudition, which somehow didn’t fit in my mind with his image as an editor of a chic journal. But B. turned out to be a man of many interests and talents (“Je n’ai pas un violon d’Ingres, j’ai un orchestre d’Ingres,” he joked at one point), and we spent a pleasant few hours talking about everything from opera to French structuralism, with which he feels a great affinity. At first we spoke Hungarian, but when things got really interesting we settled into French, which he speaks very well with a heavy Hungarian accent.

I asked him about the journal. “Well, I think you have great areas of empathy in you, but you simply cannot imagine what it was like to be an intellectual here around 1987-88. Suddenly, everything seemed possible. I had purposely chosen to specialize in literature before 1600, just to make sure I would never have to write anything about politics. Under the communist regime, that was the only way I felt I could survive. But then, when things began to change, I felt I could and should take an active role.” So he and some friends founded the journal, in the very room where we were sitting–and he didn’t even have a telephone at the time!

After looking at the “Contents” of Subversive Intent, which I had xeroxed for him (the book is on its way), he asked: “Are you close to feminism?” Yes, I answered. He smiled broadly: “I wrote one of the first feminist articles in Hungary–about a 16th-century poet, the first Hungarian woman poet, who wasn’t mentioned in any of the official literary histories.” But now, he no longer considers himself a feminist because all the ones he knows are too angry. He likes women, but not feminism. Are there any women on the editorial board of the journal? I asked. (I knew full well there aren’t any, I had read the masthead.) No, he answered. There are too many “fistfights” (bagarres) among the editors, and in a woman’s presence they might not turn out the same way. Some men become too wildly competitive if a woman is present, as if to prove themselves to her. What did I think about that? That it’s very hard for men to think of women as equals, I answered.

He gave me his latest book–about three kinds of readers, all of them “played” by himself. As he was telling me about his three readers I couldn’t help thinking of the four sons at the Seder, especially since he had mentioned a short while before that both of his paternal grandparents were Jewish. He said neither he nor his father thought of themselves as Jews, though of course, at the first sign of anti-Semitism, he identifies himself as one. He inscribed his book, in Hungarian, “To Zsuzsa, with much affection–B. the feminist.” I gave him some of my essays. The visit lasted more than four hours.

Saturday, February 6

Spent the afternoon in my office, reading final papers for my “War and Memory” seminar. The first one I read was K.’s interview with her father, about the last year of the war he spent in Budapest. He is three years older than I, so he was eight years old in the harsh winter of 1944-45 when all the fighting was going on. Many parallels between our stories, including the fact that all of his immediate family survived. K. writes that she has always known her father was a Holocaust survivor, and he told her many stories when she was a child. The stories were always doctored, or as she put it “filtered,” in such a way that they were tales of good luck and triumph, not of fear or anxiety. It was only now, in this formal interview, that her father, with her prompting, spoke about his fears.

Reading her essay, I wondered why I never told such stories to my children–why, in all innocence or thoughtlessness, I never considered myself as a survivor all these years. I finally decided it had something to do with the fact that I left Hungary in 1949, not 1956 like K.’s father. He was 20, he has an unmistakable accent when he speaks English–there was no “forgetting” his past. I, on the other hand, looked and spoke like many other smart middle-class American Jewish girls by the time I graduated from high school. So I could easily pass, “forget” where I came from or consider it irrelevant, and want other people to consider it that too.

The funny thing is, these days I am irritated when I discover that someone I know thinks of me as “just another American,” or even an American Jew. The other night, at the dinner for Ruth Wisse in Cambridge, D. expressed surprise when I told her I was born in Budapest. So I immediately sent her my two memoirs, as soon as I left the dinner!

Two days ago I bought Magyar Forum, the weekly newspaper of the ruling Magyar Demokrata Forum–or more exactly, of the party’s far-right wing, led by Csurka Istvan. I finally read it this morning. Csurka’s column is on page 2–a piece extolling the Hungarian people (Magyar nep), the “silent majority” against the political “elite.” Since the column starts out by talking about a former head of the National Bank who seems to have been mixed up in some scandal and who “has an Israeli passport,” I think “elite” may be a code word for Jews, or groups that include a lot of Jews.

A pretty piece of populist rhetoric, on the whole. I imagine it’s the kind of thing that the grocery store lady of this morning whom I overheard complaining about the price of life might find comforting. But maybe I am jumping to conclusions about the poor lady. At any rate, Csurka is not a nice man. His name should be Csunya, for he stirs up ugly feelings (csunya means ugly).

Monday, February 8

Last night all the Fellows were invited by the Rector to a concert at the Kongresszus hall, a kind of Convention hall that also serves as a concert hall. Our host, V., was most affable, and also invited us to dinner at a small restaurant not far from the Collegium. We had a wonderful time, talking about frivolities, but also after a while about Csurka and the reasons for the resurgence of nationalism in Central Europe. V. enumerated the usual political reaons: a reaction to the internationalism of the Communist regimes, economic and social inequalities that cause resentment (but B. had told me that it was under Communism one saw the greatest and most unfair inequalities), and generally the recession. But that still doesn’t explain the deep psychological attraction of nationalism and xenophobia in these parts. We agreed that this was an important subject of discussion for the Collegium.

Things noticed: People can be awfully touchy in stores around here. Last Wednesday, on my first day here, I stopped to buy some shampoo in a small store on Bartok Bela ut, which was quite crowded with customers. A young woman near the cash register was surveying the clients, and at one point she said to a woman: “Don’t handle the merchandise too much.” The woman got terribly upset, and stalked out of the store without buying anything: “You’re too disrespectful (pimasz), so I won’t buy from you,” she said in a huff. Similar scene the next day, at the flower vendor stall on the corner of Bartok Bela and Bocskai. The old lady told a young woman not to handle the flowers, and the young woman went away saying, “Then I won’t buy any.” Finally, a similar scene at the concert at the French Institute on Saturday night. During intermission, many people were swarming around the bar ordering coffee, tea, or other drinks. A young man calls out to the waitress: “One coffee, please.” His friend, another young guy, adds: “Some cream,” and then “A milk.” The waitress thought he was ordering a glass of milk, which was a little bit strange for that time of night for a young adult. She was about to give it to him when he said, very rudely, “Didn’t you understand I was asking for milk in my coffee?” She said: “But you didn’t say that, you didn’t say ‘a coffee with milk.’” He then replied: “Well, you heard me ask for cream, didn’t you? What did you think I wanted to do with it, pour it behind my ear?” At that point she got very angry and threw his change at him on the counter. He grumbled, “You don’t have to throw things at me, madam.”

The whole scene was imbued with a degree of aggression I found quite astonishing, directed largely by the young man at the young woman. In the other scenes, it was two women who were involved each time, so it’s not a gender issue (though in this instance I think there was some gender tension as well). One thing all this shows, I guess, is that Hungarians have easily bruisable egos; another, perhaps, is that under the new democratic regime, they won’t “let themselves be pushed around anymore”; or, finally, that they’re feeling generally anxious, especially about things related to money.

Tuesday, February 9

Very interesting TV program, this evening–the first of two films on what appears to be the political history of Hungary from the 1930s to 1956 (I came in late, so I didn’t see the beginning). Tonight’s installment stopped in 1949. It’s based entirely on interviews with men who were involved in politics, non-Communists of course. The three this evening were Nyeste Zoltan, who was a leader of the Kisgazdasag (Smallholders) Party after the war–for a while, part of a democratic coalition with the Communists; Fabry Pal, a journalist and diplomat who stayed out of Hungary after 1949; and someone whose name I’m not sure of, who was a chemist and then an opera singer. They all talked about the war–by 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary, it was time to resist. Nyeste, a big bearded fellow, had a good story: he and some other students composed a text protesting the German occupation (March 1944), and their plan was to have it made up in posters and post it all over the city. The plan was never realized because the young man carrying the text to the printer was arrested by the Hungarian secret police. But nobody got hurt or even thrown in prison, because the police chief found out that not a single Communist or a single Jew had been among the plotters. “You understand, the myth was that only Communists and Jews were resisting Hitler–no authentic Hungarian would dream of such a thing. So, they preferred to hush up the whole affair rather than have to admit the truth.” And he gave a big laugh.

After the war, all these men were involved in a democratic alliance, and their story is essentially the story of how Rakosi and the Communists succeeded in taking over the country. There was some very interesting footage of mass demonstrations of the time, huge crowds gathered on Hosok Tere, addressed by Rakosi and other orators. In one, around 1946, just before the elections that brought the Communists into a position of power (though not into a majority yet, if I understood right), people chanted “Long live Stalin!” and carried huge photos of him as banners floating above the crowd. I must have seen some crowds like that. The film (or this first part) ended with a bunch of children, boys and girls, dressed in their Uttoro (Young Pioneer) uniforms, white shirt, navy blue pants or skirt, string tie, singing a song about the smiling future. Reminded me of the time I recited Petofi’s poem about hanging all the kings, on Prize Day in 1949 at the end of fourth grade, my last year here. I really believed in that stuff–and so, judging by their uplifted faces, did the children who were singing that song.

Wednesday, February 10

Took my first villamos ride this morning–I rode from Kosztolanyi Dezso ter all the way to Deak Ferenc ter, traversing a good part of the inner city, or rather its rim formed by Muzeum korut, Karoly korut, etc.. From Deak Ferenc I went to the bank, in a small street off Jozsef Attila utca; opening an account didn’t take long, so I strolled over to Vorosmarty ter, which is truly a wonderful space–no cars allowed, and in the middle is a large statue of the poet, now wrapped in burlap to protect it from the cold. From Vorosmarty ter I walked toward the river with the intention of finding a taxi, but as none came I ended up near the Chain Bridge, on a beautiful big square with elaborate buildings facing it, and yet another statue in the middle. The square is so big and full of traffic that I didn’t cross over to see who the statue was of. Instead, I crossed the bridge. It’s quite magnificent, heavy granite and elaborate ironwork, with a superb view on both sides even today, when it was a bit hazy. Walking on the narrow passageway for pedestrians, I thought I felt some memories stirring of having crossed there as a child. But when, and with whom? Mother used to take me for walks, and so did Madame, after the war. Would we have walked this far from home? Maybe to go up to the Castle, on a Sunday afternoon.

Right in front of the bridge is the Budavar siklo, the cable car to the castle. It goes up at almost a 90 degree angle, quite impressive–drops you off very close to the National Gallery and the theater, about a five minute walk from the Collegium, where I arrived tired but happy at 3:30 p.m.. I felt elated by the beauty of the city. “It really is a great capital, it really can be compared to Paris,” I told myself at various moments during the day. That thought somehow makes me feel very proud, and also in a strange way “integrated”–since Budapest turns out to be a city I can put up there with the city I find most beautiful and seductive of all, and that has been part of my mental and emotional life during all the years when Budapest was totally outside it. Finding the link of beauty is a way to connect Budapest to my whole life, the life I spent not here, which has nothing to do with here.

Sunday, February 14

Saw a new Hungarian movie, Roncsfilm (“Junk Movie”), which turned out to be a cross between Monty Python and the French hit of two years ago, the gross Delicatessen, “film bete et mechant.” This one was funny and postmodernly self- conscious (people speaking directly into the camera, “testifying” about the action we are in the process of seeing), but it got a bit tiresome because almost all the episodes involved some kind of violent confrontation– between men, between men and women, between women. In keeping with postmodern humor, though, no matter how badly people were beaten up or stabbed or burned, they always reappeared in the next scene perfectly fine. The idea was, I think, to show the pent-up frustration and rage in people, always there just below the surface. The film starts with the breaking down of a wall, intercut with actual footage from the taking down of the Berlin wall. But the implication is, nothing has really gotten better–the subtitle of the film is “Vagy mi van ha gyoztunk?” “Or how are things now that we’ve won?” They’re not too good, is the answer. The theater, incidentally, was full, mostly very young people. I was one of the few people above 25 there.

Afterwards, I walked down Terez korut to the Oktogon, where the busiest place was the Burger King, again full of very young people. I actually went in, but when I saw that everybody was around 20, I decided to come home and make an omelette. I walked down Andrassy ut to the Opera House, very elaborate but dark (no performance tonight) and took a taxi from there. The taxi driver was extremely talkative, the first one like that I’ve met since coming to Budapest. He asked if I had seen War and Peace on the TV last night. I said no, which one was it? The American one with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. He said Audrey Hepburn was not his type, he finds her ugly. We spoke about her death, and about illness and how doctors can’t necessarily cure you if you’re sick. Then he asked me what I did for a living, I wasn’t a doctor by any chance? No, I said, I’m a tanarno, which can mean either a gymnazium (high-school) teacher or a university professor. He said it’s a nice profession, one that requires heart–only people with real heart can be good teachers. I asked him whether he had gone to university. Yes, he said, he had studied for five years there. Really? And what did he study? Engineering–he’s an engineer. And now? “Now I drive a taxi.” I didn’t want to probe any further, and besides we had arrived home. But if what he said was true, that gives one pause: since when do engineers drive taxis for a living?

Monday, February 15

Long lunch with G. today. She told me it was hard for her and N. to readjust to life in Budapest after their year in the States–as I imagine it will be hard for me to readjust after my six months in Budapest. But in their case it was more than just the “return to routine after a time of freedom elsewhere” syndrome, because life in Budapest is harsher in economic terms. After ten years of teaching and a good scholarly reputation, N. is on the second rung of a four-rung ladder that ends with the title of Professor, and he earns 15,000 Forints a month–less than $200. G. was also offered a regular teaching job at the University this year, at a salary of 13,000 Forints a month, which shows the double absurdity of the whole thing: first, because no one can possibly live on that amount, and second, because the difference between a starting salary and the salary of one who has been teaching for ten years is 2000 forints per month, or $25. In fact, everybody who teaches in the university has at least one more job, often two or three more, to make ends meet. G. turned down her offer and accepted a private administrative job instead, in which she earns three times as much. “At least you can live on that,” she said. But in the meantime, she feels every day that “nothing is happening” to her, because she doesn’t like that kind of work. She’d much rather be in the library, reading, or else translating an American novel into Hungarian. “I feel this job is good for my present, but not for my future,” she said. But for now, she has no choice. She simply cannot afford to take a university job.

Tuesday, February 16

Read Csurka’s column in last week’s Magyar Forum, which I only bought yesterday. His rhetoric is disgusting, but so clever (and at the same time so predictable) that it fascinates me. This time, his theme was: The good Hungarian Christian people are being silenced by “George Konrad-type liberalism” (he actually named him: “Konrad Gyorgyek-fele…liberalizmus”)–that is, the old leftists and Communists who now call themselves liberals, but it’s still the same old clique. Once again, it’s those Jews who are trying to keep us true Magyars, Christian Magyars, down. They control all the media, radio and television, plus all the major papers, and they have all the wealth and power. The current talk about the renewal of anti-Semitism in Hungary is just a smokescreen–what really should be talked about is the “robbing of the country” (“az orszag kirablasarol kellene szot ejteni”). In fact, this clique would like to hound the Christian Magyars not only out of politics and public life, but out of life tout court: “without persecution, there is no liberalism. They need space.”

Note how, first of all, he equates the current liberals and the old Communists–conveniently forgetting that someone “like George Konrad,” or more exactly Konrad himself, was during all his adult life a dissident in relation to the Communist regime. Csurka implies (more than implies, almost states outright) that all the Communists were Jews, hostile to true Magyar thought and spirit. He speaks of “Nagy baloldali liberalis kommunista nyilvanossag,” “great left liberal communist declarations,” as if all the adjectives were interchangeable–and at one point he mentions the name of Revai, who I think was a much feared cultural commissar in the 1950s, the man for whom B.’s father worked. “Revai and his culture band, Aczel and his shameses jumped at the throat of the national culture,” writes Csurka. He never actually uses the word “zsido,” “Jew,” but shames (Yiddish for “sexton”) is about as explicit as you can get. I assume Revai and Aczel were both Jewish, or if not, had lots of Jews working for them. Indeed, a few paragraphs later, Csurka makes a nasty dig at some of today’s liberals who “sing the song of Let’s forget the past, it’s no use looking backwards, we have to look forward.” That’s because, he says, some of them “had a Daddy who tore people’s nails off.”

I wonder who Csurka’s Daddy was. On the same page as his column there is an ad for the Magyar Forum publishing house, which has just reissued a 1938 novel about provincial life at the turn of the century, by one Csurka Peter. Any relation to Csurka Istvan?

Saw the second half of the documentary about the three men which started last week. It turns out that what they all had in common was that they left Hungary in 1956 and went to the United States–so the film was a documentary portrait of these men rather than a film about the political history of Hungary, but of course the two subjects are closely linked, since the reason they left Hungary in the first place was because of politics. Fabry Pal was the most successful, becoming a big businessman in New Orleans– founder of the first World Trade Center in 1962. The chemist/singer, Kovesdy Pal, did all kinds of physical work and eventually ended up as an art dealer in New York, where he now owns an important collection of works by the Hungarian avant-garde of the 1920s, which he is trying to sell to a museum. As for Nyeste Zoltan, it’s not clear what he does–he seems to have been in some kind of publishing venture. He is the least assimilated into American life, the most “true Hungarian” of the lot. But curiously, neither he nor the others have hurried back to Hungary, now that communism is gone. Fabry comes often, but with an American wife and American children, he can’t possibly come back to live here, he says. Kovesdy is thinking about it, waiting to see how things turn out; and Nyeste says he never stopped being Hungarian for a single day or a single minute since he left–perhaps implying that he doesn’t need to come back, for he carries Hungary with him wherever he is.

In tonight’s program, like last week, there was very interesting newsreel footage from the 1950s and later: at Stalin’s death, for example, newsreels showed mournful workers assembled, then marching in silent funeral parades; there were several other mass marches and demonstrations, with enormous portraits of Stalin and Rakosi floating above the crowd. As late as 1985, one party speaker (was it Kadar? I didn’t recognize him), discussing Hungarian politics at what looked like a dinner meeting, stated that experience in Hungary has shown a one-party system is best. There is nothing wrong in principle with a multi-party system, he said, but Hungarian history shows that in this country it hasn’t worked. Doesn’t leave much hope for Hungarian democracy, it would seem.

Wednesday, February 17

It snowed today. I had another very long Hungarian visit, this time with A., who teaches literature at the University and has two other jobs as well, like most Hungarian academics. […] A., a woman about my age, received me in her office on the ground floor, which she shares with another person who was not there. She is a very pleasant and warm person, who immediately asked if we could “tegez” each other (say “te,” like the French tu)–it makes life so much simpler, she said. I was delighted, of course. We chatted for quite a while, then she took me up to look at the library, which has a good collection of French literature–plus, of course, an excellent collection of Hungarian literature. A. introduced me to the librarian and obtained permission for me to borrow books. Great! I immediately borrowed The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature by Lorant Czigany, which she recommended. I’ve been reading it all evening.

After the library we went back to her office and chatted for another hour. […] Earlier, we had spoken about feminist criticism, and she confirmed my sense that people here know very little about it. But she also said that right now, with so many bigger problems that also affect men, she doesn’t particularly want to dwell on women’s problems or pit women against men. This sounded like the Marxist-feminist thesis in France during the 1970s (“First the revolution, then women’s problems”), and I didn’t want to engage in an argument about it at this point. I did, however, remark that not all feminist criticism is directed against men. She still wasn’t fully convinced, however.

We spoke at some length about Csurka. Csurka Peter, as I suspected, was his father and was also a right-winger. It seems that Csurka himself wrote (“Alas!” A. said) some very good plays during the ancien regime (that too was her expression), and no one could tell from them that he was an anti-Semite. In fact, he and Konrad considered themselves on the same side! “You have to understand, that was in the good old days when we were all together in opposing the regime. Our opposition was so strong that none of us realized our differences–it was only afterward that we found ourselves split into two hostile camps.” “But didn’t anyone notice his anti-Semitism?” “No! Oh, there were stories occasionally, about how he got drunk at the writers’ club and started to ‘Jew’ (zsidozni, you see we even have a verb for it in Hungarian–to badmouth the Jews), but otherwise, he kept it all under wraps. Maybe if we went back and reread his plays now, we would find indications ….” He also wrote some good stories, she said. He is around 60, the same age as Konrad. I should read some of his stories and plays–it pays to know your enemies well.

The Czigany literary history is very interesting–I could hardly put it down. It makes many things come to life, including the place names of Budapest, of which an extraordinary large number are those of writers: Vorosmarty ter, so central, is named after Mihaly V., a 19th-century poet, the first of the great poets after the language reform of the early years of the century. Kazinczy utca, which I had always associated with Jewishness–no doubt because of the synagogue there–is named after one of the architects of the language reform, which involved, mainly, standardizing orthography and expanding the vocabulary so that abstract concepts and technical terms would no longer have to be borrowed from Latin or German. The Eotvos of the Eotvos Collegium and the University was both a writer and a political figure. To an American, it’s astonishing how many streets and squares and institutions are named after writers and intellectuals: Jozsef Attila, Moricz Zsigmond, Kosztolanyi Dezs, Arany Janos, Madach Imre, Karinthy Frigyes, Jokai Mor and many many others, including of course the hero Petofi.

[…] I kept thinking about Mother this evening, especially when I spread out the map of Hungary to look for Nyiregyhaza, after reading the History. What a pity that she’s not alive now, for her and for me! I would so much have loved to ask her about her childhood, and some of the small towns she knew besides Nyiregyhaza. A few names in the same region sound very familiar, for example Hajduboszormeny and Hajduszoboszlo. I want to find Mother’s birth certificate, though I couldn’t say exactly why.

Thursday, February 18

Exhausted. I must have walked miles today, all around my old neighborhood. Villamos to Deak Ferenc ter, then up Kiraly utca to the yellow church, then right on Akacfa utca. Kiraly utca has some beautiful turn of the century buildings on it, or even older–from the last third of the 19th century, I was told later by T.. Very interesting and varied decorations on all of them. Some look in bad shape, others look redone, and it’s the same in that whole neighborhood. Kiraly utca itself is a grab-bag: some decrepit shops and some newfangled ones selling computers, electronics, etc.. Akacfa utca is mostly decrepit, at least the part I walked on, from Kiraly to number 59, in the middle of a long block. The first two houses on the odd- numbered side are black with soot and practically crumbling, though once they must have been quite noble, with columns and other elaborate decorations. Then comes a long low building which I didn’t remember at all, and after that no. 59, which could be quite beautiful. I don’t think I noticed, last time–at least, I didn’t remember–that there are three statues decorating the curved top of the facade. The three balconies, including our old one on the top left, look as if they’re ready to fall down–I don’t remember that from 1984.

I went into the courtyard, which is very rectangular indeed, and then into the stairwell. The wrought iron railings are still there, still very fine. An elderly woman dressed in red was crossing the courtyard when I walked in, and looked at me curiously. I felt odd, a bit like an intruder. No question of going up to the third floor and knocking on the old apartment door again, though I may do it one of these days–maybe if someone else is with me. In the meantime, standing at the bottom of the stairwell, I remembered the time after Daddy’s heart attack when he had to be carried up the stairs every day, since there was no elevator and he was forbidden to climb. He had hired two men who would come and join hands to form a seat, on which he sat with his arms around each man’s neck. I think this must have gone on until we left the country–or rather, until we moved out to the summer house in Romai furdo, where he didn’t have to worry about stairs. That was around June 1949.

He had the operation for his ulcer in March or thereabouts, then the heart attack a few days later, followed by the long recovery, first in the hospital and then at home. It must have been around May or early June that he gave the “thanksgiving” dinner for all the Talmudic scholars, of which I have a photograph at home: a large table full of men dressed in black caftans and black hats, with Daddy the only one wearing a regular suit. He wrote a learned speech for the occasion, a textual commentary he practiced for weeks beforehand while I listened. It was in Yiddish, so I didn’t understand a word, but every time he said the word “Rambam” I would go into gales of laughter– for some mysterious reason, I found that inner rhyme hilarious. After a while it became a whole production, I would laugh even though I no longer really thought it was funny, because I thought he expected me to. What did it matter that Rambam was Maimonides, a great scholar of antiquity? All I cared for was that Daddy should find me rapt and charming.

Coming out into the street again, I noticed that the building directly across, no. 60, had been knocked down– they seem to be getting ready to build a new house there. I crossed the street and stared intently at the facade again. A little girl, walking home from school, went by and turned around to look at me. I felt too self-conscious to take out my camera again (I had photographed the statues on the facade before going into the courtyard), as if people would notice and not like it. I noticed, or maybe only imagined, that a man standing in front of the building was staring at me suspiciously–what was I doing there, inspecting the place so closely? I suddenly felt tired and hungry, and besides I had had enough nostalgia for one day. […]

The “Evening with Vajda Miklos,” sponsored by the journal 2000, was very interesting, but I’m too tired to report on it in detail. Suffice it to say that VM was born in 1931 of a Greek Orthodox mother and converted Jewish father, and is the editor of New Hungarian Quarterly, whose mission it is to publish Hungarian authors in English translation. He said he thought of the war, including the “ostrom,” the last terrible year, as an adventure; Torok Andras, who was doing the questioning, remarked that just last month George Soros, who had been the invited guest, had used the same word (“kaland”), and I thought of what I say in “My War” about adventure. It must have something to do, I think, with having been so choye before the event, so loved and surrounded by adoring relatives, that we thought we were invincible. That, at least, is how Vajda explained it (his parents had very powerful friends, including the great actress Bajor Gizi, who had been his father’s girlfriend and was his own godmother), and I tend to agree with him. In my more modest way, I too was a totally spoiled and adored child who took all the adulation as her due.

The other thing worth noting is that the evening lasted almost three hours! Unheard of, back home. Scheduled to start at 7 p.m., it actually started at 7:20, with about 100 people in the audience. The two men sat on the stage with microphones and talked–or rather, Vajda talked about his life with just a few well-placed interventions and questions from Torok. At 8:40, Torok announced we would take a break, just as I thought the thing was going to end! Break lasted around twenty minutes, and then we were back for another hour. The audience sat patiently on the uncomfortable chairs, listening intently. Vajda said, at one point: “To be here in the darkest period of the Rakosi era [ca. 1953], one could only survive by laughing a lot”–which is what he and his friends did. Around five minutes before ten, Torok asked the audience if they had questions. I had been reflecting for close to an hour that this kind of dialogue could never happen in the U.S., where questions from the audience would have taken up at least half the time. Here, sure enough, there were only two questions. As if one could get a discussion going with an audience that had sat through almost three hours of its own silence!

Saturday, February 20

Party at T.’s apartment, a huge place across from the American Embassy. There must have been hundreds of people there–writers, academics, politicians, plus a large contingent of foreign visitors. I saw Michael B., and G., who was coiffed and made up quite provocatively, very rouged cheeks, spikey hair–she was wearing tiny black lace gloves plus a fox collar over her loose-fitting culotte dress. Michael introduced me to an interesting woman, Judy S., a journalist from Toronto whose life story resembles mine, except that she’s a few years younger–she left in 1956, after three years of elementary school. Her Hungarian is pretty good, somewhat like mine in that she doesn’t know many abstract words.

She told me about one of the men there that he had published a moving essay in a Canadian journal last year, about how he had discovered that he was Jewish. Another Hungarian “of Jewish origin”! Zsido szarmazasu: I’ve heard or read that expression half a dozen times since I got here. Few are ready to affirm, simply, “I am a Jew.” But to be “zsido szarmazasu,” of Jewish origin, is quite admissible.

Sunday, February 21

Hovirag, snowdrops. Small white bouquets wrapped in green leaves, beckoning at the flowerstands. Evening on the boulevard, the shops are still open when darkness falls. I stop with Madame and we buy a bunch of hovirag, snowflowers for the end of winter. A few weeks later it will be ibolya, violets nestled against velvety leaves–I bury my face in them, inhale the sweet smell. How I love the coming of spring!

I bought some carnations at a stand on the way to the tram stop this afternoon, to put in the vase on my desk. As the young man was wrapping them, I noticed the bunches of snowdrops, dozens of them with their stalks in a shallow pan. These flowers are smaller than the ones we have in America, so you need quite a few to make a tiny bouquet. It must be a huge amount of work to make dozens of bunches, each one wrapped in a green leaf and tied with string. I wasn’t sure of the flower’s name, so I asked the vendor. Until then, I think he took me for a Hungarian, but my question obviously told him I wasn’t. “Hovirag,” he said, looking at me curiously. Snowflower. I took a bunch out of the pan and gave it to him to wrap up. “Are you from England?” he asked. “No, from America.” After that, he spoke to me only in English.

Neither a foreigner nor a Hungarian, but something in between. Just a little off-center, not quite the real thing, but sometimes close to passing for it. One could make this into a sign of unhappiness, or on the contrary a sign of uniqueness, special status. Except that there are whole armies of people like me–not unique, unless it’s a collective uniqueness. Is that what we call history?

Most of the current issue of Magyar Forum is devoted to the founding meeting of the Magyar Ut movement, the Hungarian Way. So Csurka got to be on page 1 in a large photo showing him on the platform at the meeting, on page 2 with his weekly column, and pages 3-4 which printed the complete text of his speech. There is a close-up of him at the podium, a thick, blunt-faced man with receding hairline and double chin. (“His name really should be Csunya,” I said to myself with some satisfaction while studying the photo). He wears tinted glasses. Looks a bit like Le Pen– why do all these right-wing demagogues look like beefy parodies of “real men,” the kind that would never in a million years eat quiche?

Well, anyway. The page 2 column is about the ministerial shakeup of last week. Mr. Csurka is not happy that the MDF may be contemplating a move toward the Young Democrats (Fidesz), which would definitely require them to squeeze out the “national radicals” whose leader he is. National radicals, the phrase comes up at least four times in his article–sounds ominously like National Socialists to me. The usual theme: the People, the Nep, is being kept down by the “nomenklatura,” who used to be the Communists but who are now the liberals. They will certainly do all in their considerable power to keep the Hungarian Way from developing. But it will win out in the end, because you can’t keep the People down, etc. etc..

The speech? More of the same. True Hungarians have “Hungarianness” (Magyarsag), a matter of blood. They’re descendants of King Arpad. Christians. What all true Hungarians detest is “Naphta-liberalism”–and here Csurka the one-time playwright and short-story writer opens a parenthesis to explain about Naphta. Thomas Mann, he tells us, modeled this character in The Magic Mountain on the philosopher George Lukacs, who “as everyone knows liked to vacation in Swiss resorts” during the years before “he threw his lot in with the terror and with the Hungarian Red soldiers”–that’s an allusion to the short-lived Bela Kun government of 1919. And of course everyone also knows that Lukacs was Jewish, or rather, “of Jewish origin,” as were all the other members of the Kun government. So basically, liberals=Communists=Jews, the tried and true formula. But he says that the Magyar Ut is neither right nor left, just Hungarian.

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

Second visit with B. this morning, almost as long as the first! And very interesting. We spoke in Hungarian this time, and a lot about the current situation here. My head was spinning by the time I left, he mentioned so many names and factual details I wanted to retain.

He looked somewhat younger today, and in fact he mentioned later that he was younger than I, born after the war. His manner was still charming and somewhat scatterbrained, but not quite so “bumbling” as last time– and certainly not after we went into his study, where the really intense conversation began. “So, what do you think about what’s happening–the extreme right and all that? Are you worried?” I asked him. “No, I’m not. I’m optimistic,” he answered. That’s because, in his opinion, things are very different from what they were in the 1930s: most importantly, there is now a counter-offensive to nationalism and anti-Semitism. “We are here too,” he said. Well, of course, there were anti-nazis in the 1930s too, I pointed out. But I don’t recall his responding to that.

About anti-Semitism: “I think it’s time to become aggressive. Paradoxically, I have become much more aware of being a Jew because of it–you know that Hungarian Jews have generally been very much assimilated, and my family certainly was. But this changes things.” His idea is to write an article in which he will defend not the idea of tolerance (“Let’s be good Magyars and tolerate difference, those who are not like us”), but rather the idea of a “loose” [laza] Hungarian-ness: “I am not Magyar the way Petofi was–and if Csurka is a Magyar, then I’m not one at all. We should love difference, not tolerate it,” he said. I liked that.

September 25, 2013
The Microstructure of Logocentrism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky
Kip Canfield

Dept. of Information Systems
University of Maryland
canfield@icarus.ifsm.umbc.edu

I. On (Pure) Rhetoric

Peirce (Buchler 99) says that the task of pure rhetoric is “to ascertain the laws by which, in every scientific intelligence, one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another.” Sign models are metaphors that evolve to support any constellation of ideas, and as de Man points out, “metaphors are much more tenacious than facts” (“Semiology and Rhetoric” 123). Any critique of current ideas dealing with human cognition and symbolic behavior must therefore address the metaphoricity of sign models.

In what follows, we will explore a remarkable parallelism in stories about the sign, between the discourse of the humanities and of cognitive sciences. This exploration will be conducted in the form of close readings of two works, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” Chapter 2 of Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, and “On the proper treatment of connectionism” by Paul Smolensky. The purpose of these readings is not to apply results from one field to another or to hypothesize direct influence, but rather to investigate two rhetorical strategies that develop in the face of the same metaphoric impasse. Both of the works in question come out of a rejection of structuralism–in philosophy and cognitive science, respectively–and although their arguments are basically the same, they take different paths away from structuralism.

Derrida stakes out a skeptic’s position, one that shows the aporias and contradictions inherent in the dyadic sign model used by structuralists. He explicitly denies that there is any way around these contradictions. Smolensky, by contrast, has the scientist’s typical aversion to skepticism, and he tries to reconceive the sign model that underlies his theory of connectionism in order to resolve those same contradictions. The parallels between these two works, I will argue, may be attributed to a similarity in the historical moment of each author, even though the works themselves are twenty years apart and their authors are of different nationalities.

Derrida stakes out his territory in opposition to Structuralism, with its linguistic model of rules and grammars for atomic units of meaning. Oversimplification of Structuralism can be dangerous (see Culler 28), but in essence, Structuralism was an empiricist reaction to the interpretive projects of the New Criticism, and it explained referent meaning as the center of a symbolic system or structure. In “Linguistics and Grammatology,” Derrida demonstrates the problems that such an autistic view of human signification entails, and suggests that the dyadic sign model of Saussure is in fact responsible for generating the aporias of Structuralism.

Smolensky’s work is an oppositional response to traditional Cognitive Science, that uneasy mixture of Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Cognitive Psychology, in turn, began as a reaction to the empiricism of Behaviorism and its inability to refer to Mind as a theoretical construct. The relatively humanistic models employed by Cognitive Psychology came under attack after the field became heavily influenced by computer-based Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s, and it became fashionable to value cognitive models only if they had a computational implementation. The state of this modeling led to very simple and brittle models of human cognition and, in effect, dragged Cognitive Psychology back towards Empiricism. For example, a recent work by Alan Newell Unified Theories of Cognition) proposes a theory of cognition that is based primarily on production rules (rules of the if/then type). The complex problem of how the antecedents and consequents of these rules arise cannot be addressed in such a limited architecture: in fact, Smolensky sees this sort of dyadic sign model–the kind of model that is easily implemented on a serial computer–as the basic problem for objectivist Cognitive Science.

Both Smolensky and Derrida, then, object to a tradition that presents a simplistic, deterministic view of human signification, and both elaborate a new vision of semantics and dynamics for their sign models. Each author offers a vision of human cognition that is more complex, more mysterious, and less deterministic than the traditions they oppose.

II. Sign Models

Though the discourse of any given historical moment is governed by certain metaphors, it is often the case that changes to those metaphors are generated by the very discourse they govern. Structuralism and Cognitive Science use a static, dyadic model of the sign, but the syntactic orientation of dyadic sign models makes such explanations of meaning unsatisfying, both logically and contextually. Authors such as Sheriff have tried to rescue meaning by applying the triadic model of Peirce, with its interpretant, but this solution is largely unsuccessful because it simply inscribes pragmatics in the interpretant, leaving the connection between pragmatics and meaning obscure. The critiques of Structuralism and Cognitive Science described below rely on more flexible, dynamic sign models: Smolensky tries to change the architecture of the dyadic sign model fundamentally, while Derrida explores that model’s inability to account for the gap between the signifier and the signified. Both authors employ an organic, dynamic, systems model which unifies the oppositions that arise in static accounts of the sign.

Smolensky’s Model

Cognitive Science was carved out in academia during the mid-1970s to create an interdisciplinary home for various scholars who took an information-processing approach to cognitive modeling. Two major critical responses to this objectivist cognitive science are cognitive semantics (Lakoff, “Cognitive Semantics”) and connectionism (McClelland Parallel Distributed Processing vol. 1). George Lakoff is one of the more polemical writers of this critique. He has identified two definitional aspects of what he calls objectivist (mainstream) cognitive science. They are:

(1) The algorithmic theory of mental processes: All mental processes are algorithmic in the mathematical sense, that is, they are formal manipulations of arbitrary symbols without regard to the internal structure of symbols and their meaning.

(2) The symbolic theory of meaning: Arbitrary symbols can be made meaningful in one and only one way: by being associated with things in the world (where "the world" is taken as having a structure independent of the mental processes of any beings).("Cognitive Semantics" 119)

Lakoff goes on to propose a “cognitive semantics” (he also calls it experientialist cognition). In so doing, he challenges two major characteristics of the objectivist account. First, he counters the arbitrariness of the sign with a new theory of categorization related to the prototype theory of Rosch; second, he lambastes the syntactic orientation of algorithms in the information processing model:

The most essential feature of objectivist cognition is the separation of symbols from what they mean. It is this separation that permits one to view thought as the algorithmic manipulation of arbitrary symbols. The problem for such a view is how the symbols used in thought are to be made meaningful.("Cognitive Semantics" 125)

Lakoff’s language here revolts against the arbitrary nature of the sign and the syntactic character of algorithms. Its criticisms strike at the dualistic definition of the sign and therefore at the foundations of structuralism.

The connectionist approach to cognitive modeling accepts Lakoff’s critique, but connectionism is primarily concerned with model architecture:

Connectionist models are large networks of simple parallel computing elements, each of which carries a numerical activation value which it computes from the values of neighboring elements in the network, using some simple numerical formula. The network elements, or units, influence each other's values through connections that carry a numerical strength, or weight.(Smolensky 1)

The connectionist architecture supports distributed processing, in which each parallel processor is doing only part of a larger process that perhaps cannot be modeled as a series of steps in an algorithm (as with a Turing machine). In the connectionist models, representation is achieved by looking at an entire network of individual unit values. These models are often called parallel distributed processing (PDP) models (Rumelhart and McClelland).

The connectionist model is largely incompatible with the traditional cognitive science framework, which is symbolic and based on language. This rejection of the traditional structure of the sign (signifier/signified) makes allies of Lakoff and Smolensky. Smolensky’s article offers what he calls “the proper treatment of connectionism” (1). The article sets out to define the goals of connectionism, and it explicitly advocates a specific set of foundational principles. Smolensky’s first task is to establish the purview of his analysis, which he calls the level of the subsymbolic paradigm. This level lies somewhere between the symbolic level of traditional structuralism or cognitive science and the neural level of basic biological processes:

In calling the traditional approach to cognitive modeling the "symbolic paradigm," I intend to emphasize that in this approach, cognitive descriptions are built of entities that are symbols both in the semantic sense of referring to external objects and in the syntactic sense of being operated upon by symbol manipulation. . . . The mind has been taken to be a machine for formal symbol manipulation, and the symbols manipulated have assumed essentially the same semantics as words of English. . . . The name "subsymbolic paradigm" is intended to suggest cognitive descriptions built up of entities that correspond to constituents of the symbols used in the symbolic paradigm; these fine-grained constituents could be called subsymbols, and they are the activities of individual processing units in the connectionist networks."(3-4)

Smolensky has dispensed with the signifier/signified dyadic structure of the sign (where symbol=sign). He was forced to do this by the intractable space (gap) between the signifier and the signified. This space caused brittleness in the artificial intelligence systems–inflexibility in the face of a changing environment. By contrast, Smolensky’s architecture for the sign is very malleable. A sign (concept) has no simple internal structure that contains the big problematic gap: instead, a sign is conceived of as a network of very simple elements that allows context to intrude into (be contained in) the sign. Dreyfus and Dreyfus put it thus:

What Smolensky means by a complete, formal, and precise description is not the logical manipulation of context-free primitives--symbols that refer to features of the domain regardless of the context in which those features appear--but rather the mathematical description of an evolving dynamic system.(31-32)

Smolensky says: “the activities of the subconceptual units that comprise the symbol–its subsymbols–change across contexts” (15). He states the principle of context dependence as follows: “In the symbolic paradigm, the context of a symbol is manifest around it and consists of other symbols; in the subsymbolic paradigm, the context of a symbol is manifest inside it and consists of subsymbols” (17). At this point Smolensky has described a network structure that claims to have more powerful explanatory capabilities than the traditional dyadic model of the sign because context can intermingle with content.

Derrida’s Model

Derrida has precisely these same objections to the traditional structure of the sign. Whereas Smolensky responds with the network metaphor, Derrida’s critique is governed by the metaphor of generalized (arche) writing. Writing is the structure and process which makes possible the dynamic character of language, according to Derrida, but it is (commonly) considered to be exterior to language. He discusses this exteriority at length, arguing that

[t]he exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing in general, and I shall try to show later that there is no linguistic sign before writing. Without that exteriority, the very idea falls into decay.(Of Grammatology 14)

The problem is that once you enforce the distinction between the signifier and the signified, reference is confused, and you continually get the “eruption of the outside within the inside” Of Grammatology 34). The nature of the confusion surrounding reference in a static, dyadic account of the sign is clear in the following:

The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between the exterior and the interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system.(Of Grammatology 43; my emphasis)

This notion of penetration is parallel to Smolensky’s observations about brittleness, since including context inside the sign is an example of the exterior intruding on the interior. Under a dyadic sign-model, such an interpenetration of context and the sign is not allowed, and this prohibition, in turn, is one factor that generates critique.

III. Movement and Meaning

Both Derrida and Smolensky object to dyadic sign models because of their naive simplicity and semantic problems. This naivete is a consequence of Structuralism’s and Cognitive Science’s view of the sign as static. Both Derrida and Smolensky elaborate a dynamics in their critiques. Derrida’s mechanisms for including movement in the sign-model are differance, trace and presence, which are discussed below. Smolensky uses the mathematical theory of dynamic systems to put movement into his network structure. The semantic problems are, at root, the same as the hoary old mind/body problem of philosophy. Smolensky thinks that his sign model, in the framework of connectionism, goes some distance in solving that problem. Derrida despairs of a solution and, in fact, states that a solution is impossible. Let us look first at the semantic aspects of each critique and then at the dynamics. SEMANTICS

Structuralism and most flavors of cognitive science are forms of rationalism or introspectionism (see Chomsky, Knowledge of Language). Both Derrida and Smolensky oppose such rationalism. Smolensky proposes an intuitive processor (which is not accessible to symbolic intuition), and a conscious rule interpreter:

What kinds of programs are responsible for behavior that is not conscious rule application? I will refer to the virtual machine that runs these programs as the intuitive processor. It is presumably responsible for all of animal behavior and a huge proportion of human behavior: Perception, practiced motor behavior, fluent linguistic behavior, intuition in problem solving and game-playing--in short, practically all skilled performance.(5)

The programs running on the intuitive processor, then, are not composed of symbols which have a syntax and semantics similar to language. This idea is not mainstream in cognitive science, which takes an artificial-intelligence or information-processing view of cognition and posits exactly the intuitive/linguistic correspondence Smolensky rejects.

Smolensky translates subconceptual processes into mathematics, which are not accessible to intuition. Derrida describes the traditional rationalism as logocentrism, a fundamental effect of the atomic structure of the signified. In the course of his polemic on speech, Derrida says:

The affirmation of the essential and "natural" bond between the phone and the sense, the privilege accorded to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major signified of all other signifiers) depend expressly, and in contradiction to the other levels of Saussurian discourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of intuitive consciousness. What Saussure does not question here is the essential possibility of nonintuition. Like Husserl, Saussure determines this nonintuition teleologically as crisis.(Of Grammatology 40)

The appeal to nonintuition by both authors is a necessary break with traditional representation, and it recalls Lacan’s barrier between the signifier and the signified (Noth 303), where there is no “access from one to the other.” One can no longer retain traditional models built with now-discarded tools: the new models require a new metaphysics.

It is intriguing that both authors appeal to levels to justify the apparent difference between usual interpretations of the sign and the novel view taken in these texts. Smolensky’s appeal is to physics:

The relationship between subsymbolic and symbolic models is more like that between quantum and classical mechanics. Subsymbolic models accurately describe the microstructure of cognition, whereas symbolic models provide an approximate description of the macrostructure.(12, my emphasis)

This comparison jumps right out of his three-level architecture. The lowest level, the neural level, is closely modeled with the subsymbolic (=subconceptual) level. The highest level, the traditional symbolic (=conceptual) level, is only an approximation of the lower levels. It is an approximate language that developed to allow us (the subject) a way to talk about cognitive matters. He says:

The relation between the conceptual level and the lower levels is fundamentally different in the subsymbolic and symbolic paradigms. This leads to important differences in the kind of explanations that the paradigms offer of conceptual level behavior, and the kind of reduction used in these explanations. A symbolic model is a system of interacting processes, all with the same conceptual-level semantics as the task behavior being explained. . . . [whereas, u]nlike symbolic explanations, subsymbolic explanations rely crucially on a semantic ("dimensional") shift that accompanies the shift from the conceptual to the subconceptual levels.(11; my emphasis)

Derrida has to resort to a similar tactic in the face of our inability to escape metaphysical talk:

What Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition, is that a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally imposed . . . as instrument and technique of representation of a system of language. And that this movement, unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking, within language, of concepts like those of the sign, technique, representation, language.(Of Grammatology 43)

The dyadic structure of traditional structuralist sign models has proven unacceptable for both authors. Smolensky responds by conceiving of a new structure (a network) and Derrida by exploring the problems in the old structure (the gap between signifier and signified).

Smolensky’s Intuitive Processor

A recurring theme in these stories about levels is the inaccessibility of the lower levels to symbolic intuition. Traditional theories of the sign assume that intuition can penetrate anything cognitive. By contrast, semantics in Smolensky’s model involves the mysterious “shift” from numeric to symbolic representation, a shift described in his “subsymbolic hypothesis”:

The intuitive processor is a subconceptual connectionist dynamic system that does not admit a complete, formal, and precise conceptual level description. . . . Subsymbols are not operated upon by symbol manipulation: They participate in numerical-- not symbolic--computation.(7, 3; my emphasis)

Furthermore, the unit processors in the model do not correspond to conceptual-level semantics at all. They do not model words, concepts, or even distinctive features as described in linguistics. Smolensky proposes the following subconceptual-unit hypothesis:

The entities in the intuitive processor with semantics of conscious concepts of the task domain are complex patterns of activity over many units. Each unit participates in many such patterns. . . . At present, each individual subsymbolic model adopts particular procedures for relating patterns of activity--activity vectors--to the conceptual-level descriptions of inputs and outputs that define the model's task.(6-7)

A complete description of cognition is numerical and therefore not available in our native symbolic language. Subsymbolic computation in a dynamic system is cognition, and the asymptotic behavior of trajectories in the system is somehow approximately mapped to symbolic language. This explains the nonintuitive character of the intuitive processor and presumably explains why symbolic theories like those in linguistics always seem to almost formalize language, but ultimately fail on the fringes.

Derrida’s Origins

We have noted above that Smolensky links the subsymbolic and symbolic levels with a “semantic shift.” The Derridean concepts of trace and differance parallel these levels. These concepts operate within the metaphor of writing in a way that allows Derrida’s system of signs to move and be dynamic. For our purposes, the problem of the origin and the dynamics of differance are the salient topics in Derrida’s theory.
Because the signified is “always already in the position of the signifier” Of Grammatology 73), origins become problematic. As Derrida puts it,

Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable.(Of Grammatology 36)

This attention to the problem of origin indicates an uneasiness with semantics. Derrida uses the image of track or trace to express this uneasiness. What he says (in Smolensky’s terms) is that there is no origin because we attach a semantic purpose to origins and at the point of origins, there is no semantics. The (pure) trace is not semantic:

The trace is not only the disappearance of origin-- within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which becomes the origin of the origin. . . . The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls the sign. . . . The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general.(Of Grammatology 61-62, 65)

This recalls Smolensky’s “semantic shift” problem, in which he sets up a system where all computation is purely numerical and has no symbolic-level semantics. He must then finesse a “shift” to our human realm of signs, something Derrida says is impossible:

This arche-writing, although its concept is invoked by the themes of "the arbitrariness of the sign" and of difference, cannot and can never be recognized as the object of a science. It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced to the form of presence. . . . There cannot be a science of differance itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain nonorigin.(Of Grammatology 57,63)

Derrida, like Smolensky, emphasizes the nonintuitive or unconscious character of cognitive acts like language. Derrida calls this the “fundamental unconsciousness of language” Of Grammatology 68) and says that “Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject” Of Grammatology 69). But while Derrida says of the trace that “no concept of metaphysics can describe it” Of Grammatology 65), Smolensky has presented a mathematical metaphysics. Smolensky’s attempt has yet to tackle the precise point that Derrida has tried to show cannot be described: the point at which the non-semantic origins of signification become semantic.

Dynamics

In the terminology of engineering mechanics, statics is the study of forces on structures, and dynamics is the study of forces on structures in motion. All critiques of structuralism reflect a passing from statics to dynamics; the dynamic view of structuralism has always existed in structuralism but was not mainstream (see Piaget). Post- structural discourse emphasizes movement and temporality. Smolensky uses models taken from dynamic systems theory to achieve this, while Derrida defines a cluster of terms (differance, trace and presence) for the same purpose. Both authors use this dynamism to argue for an organic sign model that integrates form and function.
Smolensky explicitly uses the models and mathematics of dynamic systems, as studied in physics. He views the architecture of his model in this way:

The numerical activity values of all the processors in the network form a large state vector. The interactions of the processors, the equations governing how the activity vector changes over time as the processors respond to one another's values, is an activation evolution equation. This evolution equation governing the mutual interactions of the processors involves the connection weights: numerical parameters which determine the direction and magnitude of the influence of one activation value on another. The activation equation is a differential equation. . . . In learning systems, the connection weights change during training according to the learning rule, which is another differential equation: the connection evolution equation.(6)

He elaborates a “connectionist dynamical system hypothesis” in which the connection strengths (weights) of the network embody the data, and differential equations describe the dynamic process within which these data become knowledge. The state of this intuitive processor (the network) is defined by a vector which contains the numerical state of each unit processor in the network. For our discussion, the important aspects of this description are the global control over the process of signification given by the systems idea, and the semantic anomalies presented by the numerical character of the model.

Smolensky’s Global Control

The systems idea is very important in Smolensky’s discourse. It becomes possible to describe the connectionist version of cognition by using a mathematical dynamic system as a model (my discussion is informed by Rosen). A dynamic system in mathematics depends on two kinds of representation: one must represent every possible state of the system (statics), and also the behavior of the system (dynamics). The static description uses the concept of a state space, which contains an instantaneous description of every possible state of the system. These states can be described as measurements on a system. For example, in Newtonian mechanics, all particles can be described in a system with six dimensions: three for position in 3-dimensional space and three for a momentum measurement in each of those three dimensions. It is important that the number of dimensions chosen give a complete description of the state of the system. In such a model, all states that have the same values in all dimensions are identical to each other. Each dimension is a state variable and the n-tuple (or vector) of all the state variables is a representation of the (instantaneous) state of the system. The mathematical set of all possible unique vectors is the state space of the system. Therefore, most systems will be multidimensional and cannot be visualized in Euclidean space.

In order to provide a dynamic description of a system, one must know how the state variables change with time. Mathematically, this means that each state variable (dimension) is a function of time. If each of these functions is known, the dynamic behavior of the system is a trajectory in the state space through time. It is usually impossible to know these functions exactly, but since the rate of change of a single state variable depends only on that state in the state space, we can give conditions that these functions must follow. These conditions constrain the trajectory of a behavior but do not uniquely determine it. The constraint is modeled as the derivative of a function which gives the rate of change at a point (state). The derivative of a function (with respect to time) is analogous to the slope of a tangent line to a curve; the slope reflects how fast the points on the curve are changing in the neighborhood of the state. A dynamic system, then, is described by a set of simultaneous differential equations where differential equations are functions of the state variables and their derivatives. Systems described with differential equations represent infinitely many possibilities that are constrained by the (dynamically changing) structure of the system.

Dynamic systems impose a global effect on the state space. For example, in the plane of this paper, all points (positions) can be described with two numbers–the coordinates in the xy plane (a vector with two elements). The intuitive processor’s state space, however, is multidimensional: its state space is the set of all possible vectors that describe all activation values of all unit processors in the system. The global effect occurs (most simply) because a differential equation sets up conditions on every point in the state space. For example, a differential equation with a function in two dimensions involves derivatives which set up a direction field that constrains the trajectory of any curve that goes through a point in it. The direction field is a condition that attaches itself globally to every possible point, and it is what makes possible a global, system-level description of a multitude of separate interacting agents.

The modern scientific concept of fields–such as electric fields, magnetic fields, or even magic force-fields in science fiction–are examples of this kind of global effect. They are something usually unseen but considered to be real (i.e., they effect material reality) and they operate globally, albeit mysteriously, in an area of space. Smolensky sees reference as the asymptotic behavior of a trajectory in a dynamic system, and his scientistic assertion of the possibility of global control contrasts with Derrida’s exasperated skepticism, seen below.

Derrida’s Differance

The early Derrida is conducting a guerrilla war against structuralism from within the metaphysical terrain of structuralism. He only has whatever is at hand there for the fight. While Smolensky is free to use exotic weapons from his experience (he was trained as a physicist), Derrida must work within the tradition of the dyadic sign. He considers the dyadic sign constitutive of human thought, even as he shows its inadequacy for explaining meaning. Notwithstanding these differences in tradition and precept, there are many points of contact between Smolensky’s dynamic systems and Derrida’s trace and differance.

Derrida conceives of the operation of the trace as a field in the sense described above, but has no language to justify such a global and actively structuring concept. In exasperation, he calls it “theological”:

The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity [etant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily. The "theological" is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities-- generic and structural--of the trace.(Of Grammatology 47, my emphasis)

The reader should compare this description with the global structuring impact of dynamic systems on state- space, described above. At all times, Derrida presents the trace as dynamic. It is the “movement of temporalization” Of Grammatology 47), and “[t]he immotivation of the trace ought to be understood as an operation and not as a state, an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure” Of Grammatology 51). The shift from statics to dynamics is, of course, a key feature of contemporary discourse on the sign.

Derrida responds to accusations that differance is negative theology with an essay in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Frank Kermode summarizes the argument well:

The purpose of Derrida's pronouncement is to claim that differance is not negative in the same measure as the God of negative theology; for it is so in much greater measure--indeed it cannot properly be thought of as negative at all; it is outside negativity as it is outside everything. Only by an intellectual error-- induced by a sort of metaphysical paranoia, a fear for the security of that "realm"--could anybody suppose that differance has a design on us, or a desire to make itself into some sort of presence.(Kermode 75; my emphasis)

Informed by a reading of Smolensky, one might conclude that differance is desire, and that “metaphysical paranoia” is completely justified. Where structuralists and objectivist cognitive scientists assume “meaning” as a concept around which structure is built, Derrida and Smolensky use ideas of process and structure to produce “meaning.” The main rhetorical strategy both authors use to do this is to deny a hard distinction between form and function. This conflation gives reality to a field of signification. This is explicit in Smolensky’s mathematical metaphysics; in Derrida, it is implicit in the movement of the trace.

Derrida’s treatment of presence is interesting in relation to these metaphysical ideas. Culler, in On Deconstruction, invokes Zeno’s paradox to explain Derrida’s insistence on the impossibility of presence. The present moment is never really present, but always marked with the past and the future. The present is then not real, as difference is not real. Trace “does not exist” and differance is “nothing.” Time and absence conspire to destroy any phenomenology.

Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological experience of a presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why, once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible. No intuition can be realized in the place where "the whites indeed take on an importance."(Of Grammatology 68)

One might be tempted to regain presence by an appeal to the idea of a field of signification, proposed above, but presence fails for both authors at the point where its phenomenology must be intuitively accessible to the subject. Both authors set up a metaphysics which describes a mechanism for presence, but both place that mechanism in the inhuman realm of numbers or (pure) traces.

Derrida’s insistence, then, on presence and difference as “nothing” might be understood as referring only to the realm of human consciousness, the only realm describable in structuralist terms. Derrida’s nullification of presence and differance recall a funny story, an old chestnut, that I have most recently seen reincarnated in a book by Arbib In Search of the Person): it seems that there was this mathematician who wished to prove something for Riemann geometry. He disappeared into a room and filled a blackboard with Dirichlet integrals and other mathematical arcana. After a time, a cry was heard from the room, “Wait! Wait! I’ve proved too much! I’ve proved there are no prime numbers!” The nullification of differance is a funny idea when one considers such that this nullification might be the global control that produces cognition. Smolensky might accuse Derrida of having been inattentive in his calculus classes. On the other hand, Derrida would probably apply a quotation from Barthes (Noth 313) to Smolensky: “I passed through a (euphoric) dream of scientificity.”

IV. Conclusion

I would like to reiterate that this has been an exploration of rhetorical strategies that arose in two similar historical moments. My discussion ignores any justification or evaluation (scientific or otherwise) with regard to the works by Smolensky and Derrida, and it proposes no direct influence of one on the other. Most importantly, this is not a “methodological” paper that proposes something ridiculous like a “dynamic systems approach to everything.”

Both Derrida and Smolensky want to give a fuller, more complex vision of the signifying human. Structuralism and objectivist Cognitive Science present a syntactic picture of human meaning that is unsatisfying. Each author tries to breath life into the dyadic sign model by regaining presence. Smolensky explicitly appeals to presence as a field in dynamic systems theory. Derrida precisely defines such a field with the terms trace and differance while denying their reality because he rejects the concept of global control. The genesis of these critiques is the static character of structuralist or objectivist accounts of signification, theories which relegate all process to the gap between a signified and a signifier, a gap which is “nothing”: Derrida and Smolensky rush in to fill this void. Both authors note a semantic problem for sign models that requires a mysterious “semantic shift” from the unconscious to the conscious. This semantic anomaly does not allow intuitive access to the basis of the sign model. Derrida sees this as an insurmountable mystery, while Smolensky thinks it can be accounted for.

Spivak uses Levi-Strauss’ term bricolage to contrast modern discourse with engineering: “All Knowledge, whether one knows it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye on the myth of engineering” Of Grammatology xx). Smolensky and Derrida are doing similar odd jobs, but with different tool boxes. Smolensky, with his “eye on the myth of engineering,” is a bricoleur with a full quiver of metaphor: he can play Ahab (“That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate”). Derrida doesn’t have much faith in his weapons: he can love the whale.

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- Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Trans. and introd. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
- —. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Languages of the Unsayable: Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. S. Budick, & W. Iser. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1989.
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- Lakoff, G. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987.
- —. “Smolensky, semantics, and sensorimotor system.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 39-40.
- —. “Cognitive Semantics.” Meaning and mental representations. Ed. U. Eco, M. Santambrogio, & P. Violi. Indiana, IL: Indiana UP, 1988.
- McClelland, J., Rumelhart, D., & Group, P. R. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1986.
- Newell, A. Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.
- Noth, W. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
- Piaget, J. Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1971.
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- Rumelhart, D., McClelland, J., & Group, P. R. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1986.
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- Smolensky, P. “On the proper treatment of connectionism.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 1-74.
September 25, 2013
Reading Beyond Meaning
George Aichele

Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Adrian College
470-5237@mcimail.com

The Theology of the Text

[T]here will never be . . . any theology of the Text.

(Derrida, Dissemination 258)

If the text is an instance of what Jacques Derrida calls “differance,” the ineffable writing, then there can be no theology of the text. There can be no theology of the text because the text is the trace which escapes onto- theological closure (closure of the “volume,” of the “work”) even as it inscribes it. As the non-identity or non- presence which lies at the heart of any scriptural identity, the text is no more than the entirely material “stuff” (hyle) which the idealism inherent in the traditional understanding of the text does not comprehend and therefore excludes.

This understanding of what a text is differs greatly from the traditional one. The traditional understanding of the text allows us to speak of two readers reading “the same text” (book, story, poem, etc.) even though not only the physical objects of the reading but the editions and even the translations involved are different. It allows us to agree or disagree about the legitimacy of an interpretation, the authority of an edition, or the accuracy of a translation. The invisible, underlying stratum which allows us to posit the identity of texts is their meaning, the spiritual essence which binds many varying physical copies into unity.

The traditional understanding of the text is therefore profoundly theological; it is that very theology of the text which differance refuses. It is also profoundly logocentric. For this understanding, the text is not the concrete, unique ink-and-paper thing which you might hold in your hand, scan with your eyes, file on a shelf, give away, or even throw in the trash.¹ Instead, the text is an ideal, spiritual substance, a Platonic form of which the material thing is merely a “copy.” The physical object is simply the medium, the channel in and through which the spiritual reality has become incarnate. This way of thinking seems quite natural to us; this indicates how deeply ingrained the theology involved here actually is.

Corresponding closely to the theology of the text is a complex economy of the text, which allows texts to be owned in three distinct but interrelated ways. The conspiracy between these three types of ownership forms the traditional understanding of the text. Meaning is at the center of this system of values; what defines each of the three types of ownership, and their relations to one another, is the desire for meaning. These three types of ownership together establish a law of the text, a system which authenticates “my property” and delimits my rights and obligations in relation to the text. The law of the text establishes the legitimacy of meaning, the possibility of a proper reading. It is the law of what Roland Barthes calls the readerly.

The first owner, the reader, normally owns one copy of the text, a physical object, the book. The reader desires but has no guarantee of owning the book’s meaning. The second owner, the author, is the book’s origin and therefore owns its meaning–the true meaning reflected in every copy. The author secures the book’s meaning. There is also a third “owner,” the copyright holder, who may also be the author (or the reader). This owner possesses the legal right to disseminate copies, to control the event of incarnation. Each of these owners may say, “This is my book,” but the term “my book” cannot mean the same thing in each of these three cases.

This economy of triple ownership turns the text into a “work.”² For Barthes, the work is defined by society’s recognition of an author and thus of an authority: “One must realize that today it is the work’s ‘quality’ … and not the actual process of reading that can establish differences between books” (“From Work to Text” 79). The work is meaningful and complete; it is an object of consumption. All three owners require the work to be a union of spirit and matter–a union which can (and must) be undone. For the theology of the text, meaning is “in” the text; it is a property of the text.

The theology of the text requires that a distinction be made between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis draws (or leads) the truth out of the text; eisegesis imposes the reader’s beliefs upon or reads them into the text. No confusion is permitted between these two. It is an ethical distinction: exegesis respects the integrity of the text, and eisegesis does not. Metaphysics is also involved: the text contains a truth within it, which the skillful reader can extract more or less undamaged, and without imposing too many of her own preconceptions upon it. The text is in some way connected to reality–a reality which is outside of the text (extratextual)–and it is this reality which grounds the proper meaning of the text, inside of the text.

Of course, the theology of the text recognizes that no reading is entirely free of preconceptions, no matter how objective or unbiased the reader may be. Your readings are inevitably shaped by who you are, your previous experiences, feelings and beliefs, and your current contexts, desires, and expectations. Crossing the gap between receiver and sender of any message requires a tricky and sometimes dangerous journey. The traditional understanding of the text assures us that there are guarantees which lessen the difficulties and overcome the dangers in transmission of meaning. These guarantees are provided by rigorous critical techniques, often historical, but also psychological, sociological, or literary. Within the text itself there hides an accessible meaning, which one technique or another can uncover. These techniques provide ways to bridge the gap between text and reality, to capture meaning and thereby close the circle of understanding. Completely objective analysis is impossible, but with proper use of the techniques something approaching a scientific consensus can be reached.

However, the theologically indispensable distinction between exegesis and eisegesis has been eroded in recent years. First the New Criticism, then structuralism, and most recently the various forms of poststructuralism (including the views of Derrida, Barthes, and Michel Foucault) have with increasing vigor exposed and challenged theological presuppositions on which the traditional understanding of the text rests. The notion that each text contains within it a single true meaning–or any meaning– has been abandoned by many, and the question of reference– the connection between text and reality–is up for grabs. The Eurocentric and phallocentric tendencies of the supposedly scientific criticism are increasingly difficult to deny, although defenders of the Western cultural tradition (the “great books”) remain plentiful, and the debate is probably far from over.

There will never be any theology of the text, says Derrida. However, if we must do without a theology of the text, then perhaps a theology of reading can in some respects take its place. The question of the object of our reading becomes uncertain and even mysterious, but the question of what reading is can be at least partly answered. In our belief that there is a connection between the text and reality, we have overlooked or minimized theologically important dimensions of reading, including the role of the reader in the production of meaning, the influence of ideology upon reading, and the resistance to meaning inherent within texts.³ As the concept of “text” becomes problematic and elusive for postmodern thought, an understanding of reading becomes more desirable. We can no longer rely upon a theology of the text, but we can explore a theology of reading.

The Non-Reader

Reading is an endless and violent playing with the text, and the reader is in a perpetual struggle with the law of the text. She draws her life from this law even as she disturbs it; she is a vector directing the movement of the law and giving it meaning. The law establishes the book as a meaning-filled work, as the product of a worker (an author) within a system of exchange which makes it available as a piece of property. Nevertheless the reader determines the value of the book, as a work, for all of its various owners.

In Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, there is a character named Irnerio. Irnerio is a “non-reader”–a person who has taught himself how not to read. He is not illiterate, not even “functionally illiterate.” Irnerio refuses to read. Yet Irnerio does not refuse to look at written words. Rather, he has learned how to see strange and meaningless ink marks on pages where others see words. Irnerio is beyond reading; for him the books, pages, and words are no longer the transparent vehicles for immaterial ideas, but they are solid, opaque objects.

I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. . . . The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.(49)

For the non-reader, the written words eventually “disappear”–they disintegrate into not-quite-letters, shapes, blobs of darkness on the white page. This is because the non-reader looks at them, at the physical marks themselves, and not at what they mean. The words disappear into sheer materiality; they become meaningless deposits of ink on paper. They are not altered physically, but they lose their signifying potential. They cease to be filled with what the philosopher Gottlob Frege called “sense”; they become nonsensical. The printed words return to what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic chora. To speak of such texts as more-or-less accurate copies of an ideal, transcendent original is impossible.

The words also disappear for readers, but for the opposite reason, and in the opposite direction. As you learned to read, the meaning of the words gradually came to dominate the physical text. You learned to conceptualize past or through the concrete marks that make up words and sentences, to “see” meanings or ideas that are represented, to hear the language with your mind’s ear. As reading became easier for you, the materiality of writing (as an obstruction to sense) became an almost invisible, transparent vehicle; what you really read is what the written words “say,” their meaning. You only read words insofar as writing itself has become invisible. What you read is the idea within the word, and you don’t like it if the materiality of the word obscures the idea.

Thus the written word may disappear in either of two directions, which correspond to the two components that make up language–the physical medium (the signifier) and the intelligible content (the signified). For the reader, the word is caught in a tension between these two components–a tension which cannot be maintained, but only imagined as a midpoint between two extremes. When either of the differences which make signification possible–differences between signifiers, or differences between signifieds–are foregrounded (when they become visible), the word disappears. For those who know how to read–and this includes non-readers such as Irnerio–one component or the other must be foregrounded. Unlike Irnerio, readers choose to foreground the signified: the concepts, feelings, and other representations derived from reading. To foreground the material signifier of writing rather than its signified meaning, as Irnerio does, seems ludicrous and irresponsible to us–it goes against the grain; it is unnatural.

Non-reading stays close to the physical letter, the written word. This would correspond to Barthes’s “text of bliss,” the writerly text. A reader can become a non-reader only through a deliberate choice; such a choice reflects upon, and rejects, the ethics (and economics, and theology) of the text. Irnerio refuses the categories of ownership, at least when it comes to books. If he were not such an agreeable fellow, and actually quite moral in his own strange way, you would have to think of Irnerio as evil. Yet readers are also non-readers, although in a limited way. When you attempt to decipher an unusual script, or study a language with a different alphabet, the foregrounding of the signifier is unavoidable, and often unpleasant. You then become an inadvertent non-reader, although unlike Irnerio you are still trying to read.

However, no one can actually learn not to read. Irnerio represents an unreachable goal; that is why his subversions of literariness do not upset us. Instead, they amuse us. Not to read is an impossible ideal, for the unconscious habits of reading cannot be entirely unlearned. The non-reader rejects the signified, and chooses only the signifier. However, a signifier without a signified is impossible; hence the non-reader is impossible. Probably only the truly illiterate person–the one who can make nothing out of writing–can actually see the written word as a bunch of squiggles, senseless marks which cannot be significantly distinguished from other similar squiggles. Such squiggles are not signifiers, and they have no signifieds.

For Irnerio all that counts is the life lived instant by instant; art for him counts as expenditure of vital energy, not as a work that remains, not as that accumulation of life that [the reader] seeks in books. But he also recognizes, without need of reading, that energy somehow accumulated, and he feels obliged to bring it back into circulation, using [the reader's] books as the material base for works in which he can invest his own energy, at least for an instant.(150)

Irnerio views books merely as things. He is an artist, and literature is his medium, but not as we might expect. Books are worthy in and of themselves, but only as the meaningless stuff (hyle) which he glues together into larger hunks and then carves into abstract sculptures. However, non-reading is not easy, even for a master such as Irnerio. How does he decide which book is the right one for a sculpture? Is his decision based solely on the physical matter of the book (color or shape of cover, size or thickness of pages, binding, typeface, etc.), or is Irnerio also somehow aware of its contents?

I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them.. . . . The critics say what I do is important. Now they’re putting all my works in a book. . . . A book with photographs of all my works. When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works.

. . . . There are some books that immediately give me the idea of what I can make from them, but others don't. Sometimes I have an idea, but I can't make it until I find the right book.(149)

Non-reading points to the limit-condition which defines reading: its material situation. It highlights the theology implicit in the traditional understanding of the text. Yet the non-reader is clearly a sort of parasite on the literate world, or indeed, on literature itself. Irnerio cannot exist unless readers exist, unless an entire immense structure of civilization exists–including authors and publishing houses and scholars and bookstores and translators, as well as economic and educational and political systems–a structure which allows and requires readers to be readers. The ramifications of that larger structure provide the world and much of the plot of Calvino’s novel.

Literal Translation

The reader is made possible by the misplacing of the word which is writing. Every reading is a translation, a transfer (or “metaphor”) of something which allegedly lies on or in the page–Frege’s “sense”–to some other place inside the reader’s mind. Yet as Irnerio makes clear, when he refuses to read, that “something” is not the physical stuff of the books themselves, but something else entirely. Readers are trans-lators, those who take things from their proper places and move them somewhere else, and reading is intertextual, an endless juxtaposition and interchange of texts which is a kind of translation. The theology of reading entails also a theory of translation, and vice versa.

For the theology of the text, the goal of the translator is to retrieve the authentic message of the original text and then re-embody that message in a new text. It is only the ideal text, the “work,” which can be translated, not the material text. Translation is exegesis. Compared to its meaning, the physical aspects of the translated text are unimportant, and they can be modified and rearranged and ultimately sloughed off, like a mortal human body temporarily inhabited by an eternal soul. As noted above, the theology of the text has its own doctrine of the incarnation, for which the spiritual “word” enters into the written “flesh.”

The translation theory of Walter Benjamin presents an alternative view of the theological dimension of texts and the operations of language–a view that is close to Irnerio’s. According to Benjamin, the goal of translation is not to transfer a meaning (which can somehow be detached from its linguistic embodiment) from one textual body to another, but rather to form a kind of reciprocity between the translation and the original text, so that the reader sees through both to “pure language.” This pure or “true” language is not an historical, empirical language, but rather it is language itself, language without purpose, meaning, or function–language speaking only itself, endlessly. Benjamin called this goal “literal translation.”

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.(79)

Literal translation seeks “a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function . . . pure signifier . . . paradoxical in the extreme” (de Man 96-97). The goal of literal translation is the interlinear text, “in which literalness and freedom are united” (Benjamin 82). In the space between the parallel lines of the two texts, the translation and its original are united in a true language “without the mediation of meaning.” The translation reflects back upon and reveals the original as a fragment of pure language, in a way that it is unable to reveal itself. In translation the original is brought back to life, and the pure language imprisoned within the original text is “liberated” (Benjamin 71-72, 80). It is translation, according to Benjamin, that “saves” the text.

For Benjamin, the principal question in translation theory is: how does the translated text illuminate the original text? The value of a translation lies in its confrontation with the original text, not in its infallible transmission of the meaning of that text. The preferred translation will not necessarily be the most accurate one, the clearest transmission of meaning, but rather the one which stands in tension with the original text. Literal translation measures the uniqueness of the material text by the other texts with which it is juxtaposed, and with the possibilities for intertextual meaning which then emerge. Like a tangent to a circle, the translation harmoniously supplements and complements the original. There is no question of the two texts somehow being two copies of the same thing.

The interlinear space of translation is utopian and uninhabitable; it is sacred and untouchable space (Derrida, The Ear of the Other 115). The letters of the alphabet, from which the text is assembled, are meaningless in themselves. The text itself as a physical object, the material space of the semiotic, is deficient in meaning. The physical text is a literal text, and therefore it resists interpretation. It is unreadable, non-readable, non-readerly. According to this view, the purpose of language is not to reveal but to conceal, and translation tests the power of language to hide meaning:

[T]ranslation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed.(Benjamin 78)

Literal translation seeks to uncover the language spoken by God in creating the universe–that is, a language of naming. For literal translation, the proper name is a matter of crucial importance. Names cannot be translated, strictly speaking–they stand at the very edge of language, at the boundary of signification. Names have meaning (they refer to objects), and yet they do not mean (they cannot be defined). The name is language beyond meaning, without meaning–a language “lost” by humanity (because “confused” by God) at the Tower of Babel.

Benjamin’s views on translation come explicitly into the realm of theology, and they are close to a kind of Kabbalist mysticism. Like non-reading, literal translation draws language back to a point of ineffability, to the edge of the human world. It empties language of significance, reducing it to a material residuum alone. Literal translation refuses to allow the separation of meaning from its physical embodiment, and thereby it de-values the question of meaning. The ideal of exegetical translation is rejected. However, the absence of an extratextual realm of meaning does not liberate translation but rather constrains it, and perhaps even renders it impossible.

Materialist Reading

The reader invents the work as an authority, something worth owning. This law of ownership is equivalent to the desire for translation, and for exegesis. Barthes identified this kind of reading with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” In its explorations of narrative codes, strategies of authority, and the production of meaning, Barthes’s writings, and especially S/Z, present an important contribution to the theology of reading. Fernando Belo’s book, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark, is one of the few sustained attempts apart from S/Z itself to apply this method to any writing, although one might argue that Calvino’s novel playfully hoists Barthes on his own petard.

S/Z is an immensely complex and close reading of Honore de Balzac’s novella, Sarrasine. Barthes divided Balzac’s story into 561 “lexias,” which he then analyzed in terms of five “codes” which he found operating throughout that narrative. A lexia is a phrase (in the sense that Jean-Francois Lyotard has given to that term), an individual semantic unit which may range in length from part of a sentence to several sentences. The codes are the cultural and intellectual filters through which the great abstract repository of langue becomes the limited specificity of parole, and through which the field of potential signification (what Kristeva calls the semiotic) is formed into a narrative world (what Kristeva calls the symbolic). The codes permit and also channel the conjunction of signifier and signified.

The codes form the structures through which Sarrasine creates the readerly illusion of a transparent window (a story within a story) opening on to a coherent and realistic world. In the larger, “framing” story, an unnamed man attempts, and fails, to seduce a beautiful young woman by agreeing to reveal to her the identity of a mysterious old man. This revelation takes the form of a story (the inner, “framed” story) of a foolish and impetuous artist (Sarrasine) who mistakes a beautiful castrato (La Zambinella) for a woman and falls in love with “her,” with fatal consequences. Barthes’s detailed analysis of these codes, one or more of which functions in each of the lexias, reveals that they conceal a deep narrative incoherence (the writerly), an absence or deficiency (a castration) which the narrative both represents and is.

This catastrophic collapse always takes the same form: that of an unrestrained metonymy. By abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this metonymy abolishes the power of legal substitution on which meaning is based: it is then no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes, possessions; it is no longer possible to safeguard an order of just equivalence; in a word, it is no longer possible to represent, to make things representative, individuated, separate, assigned. (215-216) At its discreet urging, we want to ask the classic text: What are you thinking about? but the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering: about nothing, does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension.(217)

The writerly is the resistance which the text offers to coherent meaning–not an active resistance, as of a living presence (such as the intention of an author), but a passive, inertial resistance, a kind of friction. It is lodged in the materiality of the text as writing (hence Barthes’s term). This materiality disrupts the narrative codes, interrupting their operation or setting them against one another, and therefore the writerly may be identified through the frustration of the reader’s desire for a readerly, followable narrative. The writerly consists in those elements of the text which remain opaque to reading, refusing to be reduced to a consistent and comprehensive understanding–and which are present in even the most readerly and realistic narratives, such as Sarrasine.

Every instance of language is at least somewhat writerly, and there are some texts which resist any coherent reading. The conflict over meaning is somehow essential to the attempt to read these writings, which are in effect all surface, a surface which reflects parabolically upon itself and which never opens up to reveal unambiguously an extratextual truth. The materiality of the text appears whenever reference is suspended or otherwise incomplete. Barthes argued that the readerly work must disappear whenever the writerly text appears, that the text de-authorizes or de-constitutes the work (“From Work to Text” 78-79).

Through his reading of Balzac, Barthes (like Benjamin) recovered in a secular way a strand of the Kabbalah, the mystical rabbinic reading of Torah which attended even to the physical shapes of the Hebrew letters, and which has been long overlooked by the logocentric idealist tradition which has dominated Western philosophical and theological thinking–the theology of the text. Barthes’s reading praxis is a Benjaminian translation; the “pure language” of the Balzacian text is uncovered, and it speaks. Through his reading of Barthes (and of the gospel of Mark), Belo has re-imported this sort of reading into biblical studies. Belo’s “materialist reading” of Mark is not merely so in the sense that as a Marxist analysis, it is materialistic. Rather, it is materialist also (and perhaps more so) in that it attends to the written/printed text as a material body.

Belo follows the same method that Barthes used, adopting some of Barthes’s codes and identifying others appropriate to Mark’s text. He claims that he intends to read Mark in terms of its narrative qualities alone, and with no regard to its referential truth-value (95). In order to do so, he divides the gospel of Mark into 73 “sequences,” each made up of one or more “scenes.” Here he compromises Barthes’s text-analytical method by combining it with traditional historical-critical views; Belo’s “sequences” are established from critical pericopes, irreducible atoms of the tradition behind the synoptic gospels as uncovered by biblical scholarship of the last two centuries. The bulk of Belo’s book consists of detailed and often provocative reading of these sequences in terms of the relevant codes.

However, despite his ingenious adaptation of codes which Barthes developed for study of a nineteenth-century French Romantic novella, so that they are also relevant to a first-century Hellenistic Jewish gospel, Belo rarely uncovers in Mark the sort of remarkable narrative structures that Barthes does in Sarrasine. This is not a consequence of the differences between these texts. The gospel of Mark is more writerly than Balzac’s story, although its long entombment within the security of the Christian canon has protected it from this sort of critical reading. Nonetheless, studies of the gospels in recent years have gone far toward penetrating that security. Belo is apparently unaware of these studies.⁴

In addition, Belo frequently accepts the judgments of traditional bourgeois biblical scholarship–the very judgments which he claims to be rejecting!–not only in relation to matters of dating and provenance of the gospel (96-97), but also and apparently unconsciously in relation to many points of exegesis. Belo admits that his reading is “naive” (1). This naivete contributes to the charm and originality of his book. However, what is most disturbing about Belo’s reading of Mark at these points is its quality of naturalness.

Belo’s reading “de-materializes” the Markan text in an effort to bring to it a kind of closure. This closed text refers to participation in an apostolic succession which continues in contemporary movements of liberation, and it turns the oppressed peoples of the world into a new Israel. To this corresponds Belo’s reading of the Markan Jesus as a Pauline Jesus (206, 297), or a Jesus who abandons Judaism in order to turn to the gentiles, and who is stopped by Jewish authorities before his revolutionary plans can be fully realized.⁵ Liberation of the oppressed is a worthy goal, but if that alone is what Mark is “really” about, then the text may once again have been closed in the name of logocentric univocity.

I share Belo’s political sympathies, and I share his disgust with the theological tepidity of contemporary bourgeois churches, but I suspect (as I think Barthes would) those points in Belo’s reading where the reader’s need for a committed writing overwhelms the materiality of the text. I then become a non-reader. This tests both my reading and Belo’s. The strengths of his reading are in those places (and they are many) where it is itself radically shaken or disrupted by the writerly qualities of the gospel of Mark, where Mark’s refusal of the bourgeois reading emerges through its refusal of any single dominant reading–even Belo’s.

The gospel of Mark is not a politically neutral text. Few texts do the job of confronting and rejecting the reader’s need for power and for control as well as Mark does. My objections to Belo’s book do not center upon his political reading, but upon his apparent desire to have his reading be the only reading. This creates a conflict which may be inherent in any reading, but which is suppressed all too often. Belo’s ability to call Mark’s textual resistance to our attention emphasizes the degree to which many readers have failed to see that resistance. It is this ideological dimension of Mark–its resistance to the reader–which demands a materialist reading. Yet it is precisely this resistance which can never be read, which can only be encountered, by any reader, as the unreadable, the non- readerliness of the text. Belo’s reading reveals the alienness of Mark’s story, and this can only happen through close attention to the materiality of the text.

Belo’s book carries profound implications for those who engage in theological enquiry beyond the confines of traditional religious institutions.⁶ His book concludes with a long “Essay in Materialist Ecclesiology” in which Belo sketches an “ecclesial” understanding of the “collective son of man” as a material presence in the world–as a body composed of hands, feet, and eyes. This body, which is inherently political, is in Mark’s view (as interpreted by Belo) Jesus’s body. It is not a body to be abandoned in an ascension to some spiritual realm, but rather it is the text itself incarnate in its readers, in this physical world, the only place where the kingdom of God might be.

The continuity thus refers us to the figure of the collective Son of man at the level of the erased text; this figure . . . functions in the register of a continuity that is indicated by the ascensional schema in which the starting point is earth. Let us demythologize this figure. . . . What will be left of the figure of the collective Son of man will be the communist program of his practice, [and] his subversiveness.(287)

For Belo, this means a re-opening of the question of resurrection, for he insists that salvation in the gospel of Mark is always salvation of the body. The “body of Christ” is no easy theological metaphor here. Belo argues that the messianic narrative of Mark lies in fundamental opposition to the theological discourse of the institutional church. It is this discourse which keeps the church from being able to read Mark in liberative fashion.

The Gospel narrative is articulated with the indefinite play of the narratives of its readings, a play that must not be closured, even in the name of reason, even in the name of God. The debate thus opened concerns the evaluation of the power at work in the practice of the bodies which we are.(294)

By playing the culturally-determined pressures toward signification (the codes) over against the writerly resistance offered by the materiality of the text, Belo’s materialist reading treads a fine line. At every step it threatens the obliteration of the very thing which makes it possible. On the one hand, the desire to produce a coherent reading is very powerful, and perhaps irresistible. On the other hand, it is the materiality of the text–its otherness–that refuses the hegemony of bourgeois theology and opens a space for Belo’s alternative reading.

Concrete Theology

Literal translation, the non-reader, and materialist reading offer approaches to a theology of reading which stress the physical, concrete aspects of the text in ways customarily ignored by traditional theories of the text, as well as by much of the Jewish and nearly all of the Christian theological tradition. Calvino, Benjamin, and Belo provide examples of what I have elsewhere called “concrete theology.”⁷ The theology of the text understands the text as an incarnate yet ultimately spiritual word. In contrast, concrete theology is a theology of reading which seeks to discover the essential carnality of the word in the materiality of the text, language at those points where it bodies itself into concrete reality, apart from any signification, exceeding its own metaphysical limits.

Concrete theology desires the “new word,” the word which is as yet or once again meaningless–not really a word, but only potentially one. It seeks this word in nonsense, incoherence, and gibberish. (This is not glossolalia, for which the “speaking in tongues” is already Spirit-filled.) In this it is both materialistic and mystical. Concrete theology therefore attends closely to those points where language resists rational or empirical analysis, where the rules of meaning are broken–for example, questions of fictionality, connotation, and metaphor.

Concrete theology rejects the theology of the text, and in so doing it makes problematic the very meaning of “theology.” Nevertheless, the word “theology” points to the ongoing, inevitable, and inescapable slide of language and thought toward metaphysical (logocentric, onto-theological) closure–the inevitable return of the traditional understanding of the text. All language and thought, even the most atheistic, the most secular, and the most scientific, is caught in the gravitational field of this great black hole which we call by words such as “presence” and “reference.” Only poetry in its most radical, linguistically self-destructive forms comes close to escaping the vortex–but in such poetry, language is at its most concrete. This is the maximum degree of the writerly.

As a theology of reading, concrete theology is intensely interested in books, writings, scripture.⁸ However, concrete theology rejects the Bible as authority, just as Belo rejects the appropriation of biblical truth by bourgeois theology, and just as Irnerio rejects the demand of every writing, the demand to be read. Concrete theology reads the Bible against the grain of established theological truth. It also rejects the church’s claim to ownership of the Bible–concrete theology liberates the Bible from the church’s hermeneutic control. It refuses the closed canon as such. The Bible becomes for it just another text, or rather, many texts. For concrete theology, the Bible is many bibles, an expanding and contracting and multiple text, a shimmering of texts which cannot be contained in any one book.

For concrete theology, exegesis is eisegesis. A better term than either of these is one recently proposed by Gary Phillips, “intergesis,” which suggests a reading between the texts, or intertextual reading. The term “exegesis” is an ideological subterfuge used to conceal a preference for one type of eisegesis over others, to make one way of reading into the text appear to be the natural, normal reading- out of what the text had within it. The works of Calvino, Benjamin, and Barthes, among others, have made it clear that there is no such thing as an objective meaning hidden within any text. The notion of a scientific critical exegesis is as dangerous in its own way as the proclamation of the “true meaning of the Bible” (as inspired by God) on the part of fundamentalist religion, to which the theology of the text is functionally equivalent.

There are no limits to eisegesis, or to misreading. As a translation from the materiality of the text, every reading is a misreading, turning the text into what it is not. Still, to say that there are no correct interpretations doesn’t mean that there are no incorrect interpretations. One who reads Sarrasine and understands La Zambinella to be a woman, or a gay man, does not read “the same story” as another who understands the accepted meaning of “castrato.”⁹ An alternative set of codes which permit the understanding of “castrato” as, e.g., “a type of woman” is not inconceivable, but such a reading would render incoherent the narrative structures of Sarrasine. In such a reading the bounds of intertextuality would be strained to the point of “anything goes,” and the thwarted desire for meaning would destroy the prospect of its own satisfaction.

However, reading is a juggling of codes, trying to get it all to “work out right.” One misreading leads to another. I read Belo’s book within the context of an attempt to understand concrete theology. I sought a materialist reading of his materialist reading. I did not read Belo in the context in which Belo reads the gospel of Mark, and yet his reading is not entirely unlike Irnerio’s non-reading, either. In addition, Belo also permits a reading from within another context, the context of “the other.” Every (re)reading changes the context and opens a way for the other. The material text–physical marks on the page–is liberated from one context, and it is transported (translated) into another. The material text remains “the same” (physically), but the meaning must be altered. It is a misunderstanding–but then, all readings are inevitably misreadings.

What is needed is an understanding of the tensions between resistance inherent in the physical aspects of the text, and ideological pressures brought to bear upon it by readers. Like Irnerio, I reshape Belo’s work to fit my own desire–I read into it. As a middle-class male gentile white heterosexual North American, I am perpetually in serious danger of reclaiming Belo’s radically neo-Marxist reading of Mark for the sort of bourgeois theology over against which he sets his own reading. That is a risk which I must take, or else not read (that is, not translate) and remain silent–unlike Irnerio, whose non-reading culminates in the work of art. Nonetheless, my reading is also not entirely foreign to Belo’s, even as it cannot be identical to his. It stands over against his book, touching it (I hope) as a tangent to a circle.

The text is the specific, material product of a concrete act of production. For the logocentric, idealist tradition, the materiality of language is only the temporary and ultimately transparent medium for the spirituality of meaning. For materialist reading, in contrast, marks on the surface of the page are not merely the vehicle or channel of a fundamentally independent meaning, passing it on from an earlier, extratextual realm (such as the mind of an author) so that it may eventually be translated back to a different, but also extratextual, location (the mind of a reader). Instead, these marks are opaque, inert, and resistant to the desire for meaning. The differences through which they signify are themselves without meaning. The material body of the text conceals even as (and more than) it reveals. Different texts are not copies of some ideal original, and they cannot be collapsed into some universal, spiritual entity.

Concrete theology is the name for awareness of the tensions involved between the desire for, and the resistance to, meaning. Concrete theology therefore also offers a way of non-reading. It presents a different reading, an alternative reading, from the mainstreams of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is a reading of the otherness of the text which may well appear to traditional readers as a mutilation of the text. It looks so intensely at the text that the words disappear, not into ideas as they do for traditional readings, but into meaningless marks. Concrete theology can never be more than a prolegomenon, a not-quite- theology, a via negativa which can only announce what it is not.

Notes

1. Increasingly, texts are not a matter of ink and paper but of magnetic or laser-optic recordings. What will the relative invisibility of such media, unreadable without special machinery, do to our thinking about texts and reading? How will the change in the physical stuff of the text itself change our theology of the text?

2. Some analytic philosophers reserve the word “text” for the physical object (words on a page); what I call here the ideal or spiritual text, they call the “work.” The work is a self-identical artistic entity (for example, a particular story) which may be found in various texts. Barthes made a similar distinction, identifying the work with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” Foucault notes some logical difficulties in the concept of “the work” (143-44).

3. Varieties of reader-response criticism remain popular and influential in literary studies, but they will not be discussed here. However, some criticisms of reader- response theory may be inferred from the following.

4. With the exception of Louis Marin’s important book and the work of a few other French structuralists, Belo does not cite any of the literary and narratological studies of the gospels of the last several decades. His references to English-speaking biblical scholars are to an earlier generation.

5. Belo’s reading here is not at all foreign to the history of bourgeois biblical scholarship, despite his claims to the contrary, but it suggests an anti-Semitism which is arguably foreign to the gospel of Mark. One finds echoes of this at several points in Belo’s reading, such as his comments on Jesus’s interactions with the Gerasene demoniac (pagans do not endanger Jesus, 130) and with the Syrophoenician woman (as an alteration of Jesus’s strategy, 145).

6. See my essay, “Post-Ecclesiastical Theology,” Explorations (Spring,1992).

7. “In order to exceed the limits, theology must uncover the not-itself which lies unnamed at its center, its hidden eccentricity and non-identity: it must become concrete” (Aichele 138-139).

8. “[T]o describe systems of meaning by postulating a final signified is to side against the very nature of meaning. . . . Scripture is a privileged domain for this problem, because, on the one hand, theologically, it is certain that a final signified is postulated: the metaphysical definition or the semantic definition of theology is to postulate the Last Signified; and because, on the other hand, the very notion of Scripture, the fact that the Bible is called Scripture, Writing, would orient us toward a more ambiguous comprehension of the problems, as if effectively, and theologically too, the base, the princeps, were still a Writing, and always a Writing” (Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge 242).

9. When I teach S/Z, I have the students read Sarrasine first, on their own. Several usually come up with such readings.

Works Cited
- Aichele, George. The Limits of Story. Chico, Calif.: Scholars P, 1985.
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
- —. “From Work to Text.” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- —. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
- Belo, Fernando. A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
- Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981.
- de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
- Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
- —. The Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
- Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- Frege, Gottlob. Translations From the Writings of Gottlob Frege. Trans. and ed. P.T. Geach and M. Black. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1952.
- Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- Phillips, Gary A. “‘What is Written? How are You Reading?’ Gospel, Intertextuality and Doing Lukewise: A Writerly Reading of Lk 10:25-37 (and 38-42).” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers. Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992.
September 25, 2013

XL (Letters on Xenakis)

Nathaniel Bobbitt

    Introduction and References

       Xenakis remains a musical figure whose methods
       have literary implications.  To consider the personality of
       Xenakis, a musical and architectural thinker, becomes a
       means to extend literary tasks in favor of physical and
       sensory aspects of experience, behavior, and prerformance.
       Xenakis stands as a reference point on how to work with
       techology and how to wonder about a technological outlook
       within the writing process.  

       In XL, Xenakis appears as the means to consider the literary
       task of treating greater quantities of detail and spatial
       reference within writing.  The next step is clearly textual
       instability and a generative prose form.

       A.  Breton's political/scientific approach, also in Xenakis
            -Collaboration and collectives
            -Science, Center of Mathematical and Automated
              Studies, compare Xenakis interest in musical
              cognition with Weil's thesis on Descartes' Science
              and Perception

       B.  What are the exercises which develop an aleatory sense
            of treating greater quantities of data, all at once,
            via:
            -Symmetry
            -Asymmetry
            -Computational complex patterns

       C.  "Objects in action,"  compared with optical illusions
               complex observations rather than the consideration
               of fallibility, hallucination:
            -Consider the juxtaposition with regular hitting
             hangers; scrapping tangle as frictive noise as
             a rythmic source
            -Waterdrops on a metal plate & microtonality

       D.  Irrational quality to be found in "objects in action"
            -Acceleration in glissandi
            -Multiphonic versus microtonal drone
            -Octave glissandi...at a microtonal degree
             These irrational qualities anticipate a "siren"       
             activity that tempi studies in Carter on the player
             piano.

                                  ***

       I.  B.F. Skinner & Xenakis as models for the commentator's
            (the friends') consideration of behavior as
            quantifiable:
            -Skinner...item...collection
            -Xenaxis...group...manipulation
            -Use of memory as heuristic module within the
             sensorial practice:  F(x, y)...sensorial
                                  F (x',y')...memorial
            -Skinner...behavior (habitual)
            -Xenakis...performance (task realization)
       Consider Skinner and Xenakis on math testing and the
        mathematics of experiment testing.

       M.
            Adieux, when I get a chance to break away from the
       hurry up and wait activity I write you, almost a symbol more
       than anything.  A symbol of what I should be in contact
       with, not that I need reminding but all my mainstays are
       packed away.  The necessity of a new place takes over so.  
       The chance to meet with others is here, as I am a substitute
       teacher.  Each day a new school, another direction, and a
       bus route to learn.  The time schedule is that of the rural
       doctor.  What does the sense of patrimony and
       grandfatherhood evoke for you: Such stodgy sorts perhaps
       are not vivid enough for "your punk German, your computer
       talk, cinema and the blurbs that run together."  Yet you
       were friendlier (than the other Darmstadters) as an ideal
       separates...and allows one to respond.  One day these
       letters, notes, and discussion may serve a sentimental end,
       that of being taken on as a companion in a stoic expression.

       For now, necessity takes over from irony.  Both are
       merciless yet irony's heartlessness and pointed humor is
       another story.  Perish the thought, enter hunger, perish the
       thought.  I think of you as someone that asks for only a
       good-humored naturalness, as the bitter and remedial feeling
       after your desires are taken care of elsewhere.  Instead
       there is the commentary the breeze after so many close calls
       and disinterested conversation between two commentators. 
       The word finally appears commentaire.  The ability to work,
       experiment, exchange over short periods, despite wider
       lapses of conversation.  Good commentator, good night.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

       1.2.0

       M.

            It hardly seems like it, but after two summers the term
       "volumetric" has taken on a life of its own coincidental,
       arbitrary, and unavoidable.  I am content with this news
       which I must explain to you...as it means undoing a tangle.

            By now you know that I am always trying to find ways to
       make more out of my sentimentality.  The act of reading a
       favorite is even more pleasurable if I can extend some
       aspect of an author and respond to that attraction in the
       reading.  Better yet, someone shows me something "how to do"
       and I use it.  The call-backs, the sentimentality I live
       over time through the debris of a better time, the reading
       matter, the source of conversation, the identifiable regard.

       You as commentator must have some idea about this as all
       this work grew out of that name..."Xenakis"...with enough
       associations and arbitrary ties, pointing out the same
       name.  The ones today regard measure and the study in
       "pictures which make you think."  Diagram, meditatio,
       Archimedes appears...in particular, the cases of the
       pendium, the bouyancy of things...offer the elements of a
       study of volumetrics in Xenakis.

       Author's Note:

            These quotes refer back until we consider curvature and
       foci in the forms of volume, but what I am after is the
       place of acceleration and temperature in volumetrics, the
       sonic boom in winter and summer according to crisp heat in
       the skyline.  Archimedes was gained from Weil, as your news
       on Xenakis's use of the etch-a-sketch all pose one question:
       how graphism informs acoustics.

            Ever since someone said, "the concert was no good
       because of the acoustics," the relationship of sound and
       space was there, but what little advantage do we take of
       the notion.  Steering clear of metaphor--the pendulum, the
       remote focal point, gravity, centrifugal force align: 
       acoustics, graphics, math, music, and architecture--without
       metaphor.

            The first example will be mine...regarding clusters in
       the form of the siren, the warning signal, and radiated
       pitch.

       1.3.0

       M.
            Tell me something, when you are out at the club, at
       what moments does imagination take over from the body
       slamming.  How weightless do they get or is it controlled
       busting one's head into a wall.  Is it just black and blue
       or does clotting appear.
            Yesterday I read about India, rioters after an act of
       self-immolation.  Degrees of frenzy, hunger, and new friends
       fear the insipid.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

        The tenets of Logic:
            -To think faster, to learn (heuristic models) within
             correction and error.
            -To handle greater quantities of data
            -Applications for a math primer for everybody:
            -Selection
            -Mathematical Expectation
            -Weighting test criteria
            -Qualities of experimental testing as fundamental to
             quantification rather than 1:1 quantification of
             behavior.

       Conclusion:

       Seek modes and resolve application tenets:
            -rythmic comparison of irregular (odd numbered)
             figures at irregular durations.
            -interval in an interval
            -compare two-sided lineal time scheme

            Stroking facial movements to stimulate memory in
       dementia patients is comparable to a normal person's
       stroking of face when one is engaged or interested.
            Yet the dementia patients ramble and stroke themselves
       but it is their hair which they stroke.  What role can
       stroking have in neurological functions in intelligence and
       cognition:
            -memory
            -learning
            -concentration
            -recollection
            -attention

       1.4.0

       M
            One can concentrate by straining the forehead to
       attempt to focus one's attention or shake one's head.  The
       relation between gesture and intelligent functions is a
       means to consider therapy and neurological stimulation
       without drugs.

       When dementia patients forget, several steps are missing:
       -image of concentration
       -direction of image (contextual relation)
       -inability to hold onto the image
            *) slipping away of name--object association
            *) slipping away of verbal--phonatory mode
            Dementia is a regression into a childlike
       consciousness: sensorial and pre-speech.  Reinforce
       sensorial rather than verbal lapses.
            We are living very modestly and that stops me.  As
       always rules the motto "go broke in a beautiful place."  The
       lake here, the amplitude of space, the triangle with Toronto
       and Canada are reasons for you to come up.  The absence of
       identity makes it even a better place.  One is free of
       influence, one can just bounce off objects in action.  The
       radio reception is fair.  The  whole thing could improve.

       1.5.0

       M.
            Aural blocks of sound, the siren, the warning signal,
       or the sound block in desphase are most active when taken in
       their coupling or drone state.  Stasis in these blocks is
       like gridlock in which the immobility of a section of a
       population flow swells until it stops and only can vibrate
       without forward motion for a while but the particles slide
       through, ungluing the gridlock.  The gridlock is never fully
       immobile, neither is the stasis, in an aural block.  The
       sonora block can be considered as a gridlock.  The gridlock
       can be considered a compact space in a maximal growth
       pattern which virbrates within itself and then passes onto
       more discrete space and motion...becoming mobile interactive
       again amazing fluttering reeds, tongues, and ureal sounds.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

       XL.2.0

       M.
            This series you will find in one piece but it has grown
       over a disperse set of circumstances, which in a way
       fragments, this study upon arhictectural design in Xenakis's
       Phillips Pavilion.  I wish this series were more solid, I
       have found few mathematical conclusions, I have been left to
       observe and pick at the bones for procedural observations.
            It was comforting to hear from you after those months
       in which I had no address to send you.  Now you can call. 
       The fact that German has outweighed programming and
       computation...on with change.
            Your mode of ruling out the waste and your admitted
       oversimplification are all parts of the commentary.  What I
       ask is that we should go into collective research, rather
       than work on solos and then join, to give solos.
            "Find yourself a programmable young thing."  If said
       what kind of hell would break out, in the form of a swollen
       lip.

       Outline

            The success of this series would be the elaboration, of
       automated simulation and manually composed reconstruction
       problems.  First condsider architectural design as it holds
       for acoustic activity.

September 25, 2013

Author: Webmaster

San Ignacio, Belize (1990) San Francisco, California U.S.A.. (1991) Agra, India (1990) San Francisco, California U.S.A. (1991) Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1991) Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992) Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

San Ignacio, Belize (1990)

San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

Agra, India (1990)

San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada

Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)

Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

Authorized by Marc Laidlaw

-A-

Aanschultz, Conreid

Aanschultz Lens

Abat-Jour

Abat-Nuit

Abaxial

Aberration

Abrasion Marks

Absorption

Accelerator!

Accommodation Of The Eye

Accumulator

Acetaldehyde

Acetic Acid

Acetic Ether

Acetone

Acetous Acid

Acetylene

Acetylene Generator

Acetylide Emulsion

End

PLANET ROCK

ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE

BIRTH OF THE COOL

MERCY, MERCY, MERCY

I’M SHOUTIN AGAIN

RUM AND COCA-COLA

WHAT IS THERE TO SAY?

TOO HOT

THEY GOT TO GO

PARADISE

LONG ROAD

WALKIN

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS

I’M ALWAYS CHASING RAINBOWS

MILES IN THE SKY

SOUTH STREET EXIT

BLUE GRAY

I WANNA THANK YOU (FOR LETTING ME BE MYSELF)

PRETTY CITY

MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE

AFTER TONIGHT

MOOD INDIGO

IF I COULD SAVE TIME IN A BOTTLE

PURPLE HAZE

NEFERTITI

STELLA BY STARLIGHT

EVIDENCE

PRAYER FOR PASSIVE RESISTANCE

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE,

TOW AWAY ZONE

MOMENTS LIKE THIS

AFTER YOU’VE GONE

CONFIRMATION

LONELY BOY

SKETCH 1

GYPSY WOMAN

SPEAK NO EVIL

HAVE A NICE DAY

TROUBLE EVERYWHERE I ROAM

NOW’S THE TIME

IN THE SMALL WEE HOURS

THE MIDNIGHT SUN WILL NEVER SET

MY FUNNY VALENTINE

GHOST TOWN

WARM VALLEY

TALLEST TREES

TAKE THE “A” TRAIN

THEME FROM THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

San Ignacio, Belize (1990)
San Francisco, California U.S.A.. (1991)
Agra, India (1990)
San Francisco, California U.S.A. (1991)
Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island,
Northwest Territories, Canada (1991)
Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)
Battambang, Cambodia (1991)