A review of Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.

Brian Massumi’s book arrives after a more-than-ten-year multidisciplinary brainstorm on “the question of the animal.” While the question has proven as hard to pose as it is to address, it is possible to point to some key moves that have inaugurated the field of animal studies and instigated a great deal of research activity across the humanities, social and life sciences. Examinations of the legal, religious, scientific, and social channels through which nonhuman animals have remained outside the purview of subjects figure large in this output (How are animals considered objects?). So too are critiques of the autonomy and stability of the human vis-à-vis that which is designated as beastly, wild, more-than-human, or otherwise animal (How does the objectivity of animals secure the subjectivity of humans?). Some of this work is empirical: studies and practices attesting to a bio-social complexity of animal species that matches if not exceeds the human, while troubling established distinctions between the two more generally. Some of it is ethical, asking how animal alterities, vulnerabilities and traumas echo or prefigure those of historically minoritized human communities and call for particular responses. Other research considers how animals come to mean what they mean, to whom, when, and why: the representations through which animality itself is conjugated. Another approach takes what Kari Weil has called a counterlinguistic turn, arguing that representation has muffled what animals might be and/or do and concealed the animality always already within the human. What Animals Teach us About Politics makes its intervention into political theory from this fourth angle, and is also sustained by a shared expectation in the field that nonhuman animals point to alternate and more hopeful ways of being in and relating to the world. If only we could tap into that promise. If only we could figure out how to think with or as animals rather than at or about them. Massumi’s offering responds to both desires; the book’s 97 pages consider how animality can help us re-evaluate “the all-too-human ways of working the political” (3).
 
The opening dedication to Massumi’s “childhood friendship” with a daily playmate “with whom I became many an animal” sets the book’s tone and aspirations. For Massumi, any meaningful discussion of animals and politics begins with the recognition that humans are also animals, that we belong on an “animal continuum,” the spectrum of which includes capacities traditionally allocated to humans but that are in fact prevalent across species (3). Our task is to read for those capacities. The risk of anthropomorphism is quickly acknowledged here, echoing other recent attempts to understand what is human-ish about the nonhuman realm.[1] Massumi’s caveat, however, carries its own risk of undermining precisely the animality he seeks to highlight as constitutive of human-to-human relations. It takes a lot of practice to think as an animal, and the suggestion that such animality might have inflections of the human is a distracting conceit to the experiment at hand.
 
The experiment is to build on the concept of “becoming animal” first laid out by Massumi’s philosophical forebears, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in a way that feels less arrogant than its initial imaginings of a nonhierarchical pack animality that defies knowable type. This is how play comes to serve as both the central motif and method of Massumi’s political theory: a process of becoming animal awash in routine-yet-still-vital “ludic gestures” that create “zones of indiscernibility” between two or more participants while also respecting and playing with their differences. Play also matters to Massumi for its ability to disrupt assumptions held about instinct more generally – for example, instinct as a state of bare and inflexible nature or instinct as pre-linguistic and oriented towards the continuity of species. Massumi reassesses instinct in light of the dynamics of animals-at-play. Contra your parents’ sociobiology, the appeal of instinct as a form of play lies in its distance from survival imperatives and its proximity to qualities of sympathy and creativity. Using Gregory Bateson’s 1972 essay on the subject, and with a possible nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s wolf pack, Massumi draws attention to two wolf cubs engaged in a play fight. “The [first] wolf cub says through his teeth: ‘this is not a bite; this is not a fight; this is a game; I am hereby placing myself on a different register of existence, which nevertheless stands for its suspended analogue” (4). From here, we learn that the bite made during play is always already gestural; a kind of lived abstraction, performed in the conditional mode, whose very execution as gesture defines the scenario of play. Importantly, the gestural aspect of the play bite is highly stylized: it produces an aesthetic yield. The cubs do not aspire to approximate real combat; there is too much flourish for that. “It is not so much ‘like’ a combat move as it is combatesque.” (9) Play is thus a “surplus-value of life [which] it performs with enthusiasm of the body, overspills instrumentality” (11), and “opens the door to improvisation” (12). Joining Bateson’s story of the cubs are Charles Darwin’s account of burrowing earthworms and Niko Tinbergen’s studies of feeding herring gull chicks, which Massumi mobilizes to argue that the social lives of animals (humans included) gravitate more towards singular expressive exuberance than toward mechanistic, normative survivalism. If true, then the lesson would seem to be that relations of conflict exercised as animal play can be full of open-ended affective life, affirming differences without reifying them.
 
Readers who are not conversant in the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as current developments in affect theory and the so-called new materialisms will struggle through the main essay. To assist, Massumi includes a series of enumerated propositions that could be consulted first for some bearings on the overall argument. In these propositions, for example, the author critiques Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things” (too many nouns, not enough verbs), the default quest to assign agency to animals (too many subjects, not enough subjectivity), and the value of singular situations over particular-yet-generalizable contexts (the historian’s bread and butter). The effect of the essay, with its concluding propositions, is accretive; it helps readers grasp its emphatic but often cryptic claims, such as “Animal politics is an ethico-aesthetics of appetition’s self-driving toward ever more inclusive immanent excess” (43). More assistance comes by way of the book’s three supplements. Essays in their own right, the supplements elaborate on some of the underpinnings of Massumi’s approach. In Supplement 1, “To Write Like a Rat Flicks Its Tail,” he builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of writing as a form of becoming animal. In Supplement 2, “The Zoology of Play,” he interrogates the zoo as a visual and spatial site through which Bateson generated his observation-based analysis. Supplement 3, “Six Theses on the Animal to Be Avoided,” critiques the field of animal studies with advice on how to do it better and shift it towards animal politics. Even with these helpful extensions, however, there is no mastering of the text, and this is likely the point. In its content as well as its frisky delivery, What Animals Teach Us About Politics is dedicated to animal play as both a topic and mode of theorizing: a contingent, rollicking sociality that reimagines the political as the “aesthetico-political” (40).
 
One lingering concern amidst this playfulness is precisely the conditions under which it takes place. Recalling Donna Haraway’s position that Deleuze and Guattari’s is a philosophy “of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud; becoming-animal is not an autre-mondialisation,” we might ask if Massumi’s variant thereof is chaotic and micro enough, if it is locatable in the lived relations between actual humans and animals, humans and humans, and animals and animals (28). On the one hand, the reconsideration of historical animal behavior studies and the theoretical propensity for unrestrained “bodying” across species signals Massumi’s eagerness to get into the ontological groove irrespective of the species confusions that flow from it. This is admirable and exciting. But at what point does his process-ontology lose the singularity of the politics he seeks to theorize and veer towards generalization? More on the tendencies of wolf cubs to bite, worms to burrow, gulls to peck, and children to play animal would be welcome. So much is riding on all of them. Consider, for instance, remarks on a child who sees a tiger, however momentarily and through whatever medium:
 

The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life – giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw. The child immediately launches itself into a movement of surpassing the given, remaining remarkably faithful to the theme of the tiger, not in its conventionality but from the angle of its processual potentiality. (83)

 
In fairness, the discussion carries on, forming one of the most detailed, and euphoric, descriptions of animal play in the book. Missing throughout, though, is any consideration of how “tigritude” takes flight differently for different children through different temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and even affective assemblages. Asking for specificity of this sort in Massumi’s writing is not meant to ramify an all-too-human politics of tigers (in the way that the author skewers the all-too-human politics of the zoo as an apparatus of identification and sentiment). But it does draw attention to how animal politics might reside more or less exclusively in an idealized state of childhood, immune from the contemporary killjoys of, say, attention deficits, time outs, hunger, anxiety, boredom, the Disney influence, or organized play dates.
 
And what of the state of tigerhood? Can the tiger’s force be anything more than an “esque” for the child? Do earthly tigers ever play human, or worm? Are there meaningful differences for an animal politics between Bateson’s carefully observed cubs who played in their own orbits and a child-tiger extending itself beyond his (Massumi’s pronoun of choice for a child, in addition to “it”)? These questions bring out the curious instability of animals in this book, which serves a theory of lively indeterminacy well, until it does not. Mid-book, Massumi takes a moment to acknowledge some randomness and justify his key term. After recognizing that “[c]alling nature’s continuum of mutual inclusion ‘animal’ is. . . somewhat arbitrary,” he argues for it as a way of starting “smack in the middle of the glorious mess that is the actual world” and for allowing “the real stakes to revolve around play” (52). These seem like plausible explanations, though at the cost of rendering the title of the book somewhat disingenuous. Animals might not teach us anything per se if their ontological status is so fluid.
 
A final concern is how animal politics plays in relation to politicized activity that continues to find strategic currency in the human/nonhuman distinction, even at the radical end of the spectrum. What, for example, might Massumi’s rendition of becoming animal mean, if anything, for African Americans mobilizing under #BlackLivesMatter? For people enduring state-sponsored violence that too often places them on an animal continuum of a different order, Massumi’s notion of animality and its instinctive mannerisms will probably not appeal as conceptual resources, despite its possible affinities with the more-than-human(ist) currents of, for example, Afrofuturism. This is to say that there is something disappointing about a philosophy espousing creative connectivity to others when it fails to connect with the human communities that stand to gain the most from rethinking the political. The extent to which that connection can be made at all will test the humble utopianism of politics as animal play and help clarify the future of animal studies.

A review of William J. Maxwell, F.B.Eyes. How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.

William J. Maxwell’s exhaustively researched and compelling study uncovers and interprets the complicated history of the relation between African American literature and the J. Edgar Hoover-led Federal Bureau of Investigations.  Maxwell examines 51 FBI files requested through the Freedom of Information Act on prominent African American writers.  In reviewing the literally thousands of pages of records on those 51 figures who comprise what Maxwell broadly calls “Afro-modernism”—namely, the arts beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and ending with the Black Arts Movement—Maxwell wishes not only to point to the obsessive and intrusive monitoring of twentieth-century African American arts and their key producers, but the ironic intimacy that formed between these two dissimilar communities as a result of their “depth of contact” through literature (6).  Maxwell states: “my overarching aim is to read the files responsively as well as judgmentally, and to reconstruct rather than prosecute the meddling of the FBI in Afro-modernist letters, a collision of dissimilar cultural forces wrongly assumed to occupy disconnected worlds” (15).  The result is a multi-dimensional book covering a range of critical topics all governed by the central thesis that government invasion, surveillance, and manipulation of the Afro-modernist community and African Americans more generally was strangely a dialectical process of asymmetrical reinforcement through mutual hostility and suspicion.  Maxwell concludes through a set of five theses that Hoover’s construction of the FBI directly corresponds with his methods of monitoring the literary output of Afro-modernism, at once indirectly shaping the evolution of various Afro-modernist aesthetics, offering American literary works (and African-American literature particularly) sustained critical attention and, through continual meddling and manipulation, directly participating in the construction of the internationalist character of Afro-modernism.
 
In order to elucidate the forces at work in the interaction between Afro-modernism and the FBI, Maxwell’s book takes on an unusual heteroglossic form, ranging over a variety of topics written with a kind of bifurcated authorial persona, as if Maxwell were trying to target both an academic audience and a lay audience.  For instance, Maxwell may casually and somewhat loosely invoke Foucault or Agamben, defining key theoretical terms that are well known to academics when he’s in popular historical narrative mode.  Here it feels as if his primary audience is not so much the academic as the interested lay person. At other times he engages in fairly rigorous theoretical exposition, invoking current academic debates and providing context that seems directed to fellow academics.  The book covers a diverse range of topics too.  Among them: a history of New Criticism that elucidates the interpretive tactics often prevalent in the CIA in contradistinction to the FBI’s more ideologically minded approach; an overview of current trans-nationalist theory used to discuss key distinctions between the nation and the state and their various repressive regimes; a popular biography of Hoover and several other key FBI figures; historical overviews in the mode of popular history of key evolutionary moments in the FBI, including its on-again, off-again relationship with the Executive branch and with spy agencies and its adaptation to major events or periods; and formalist readings of bureaucratic documents side-by-side with readings of poems and novels.  Each of these often lengthy contextualizing frames can make one forget the central topic, namely, Afro-modernists and the FBI, because the subject of FBI surveillance of Afro-modernism drops out of the discussion for many pages at a time.  However, these contexts are also fascinating in their own right and crucial to and enlarge the story at hand.  In other words, while the thesis concerns the FBI/Afro-modernist correlation, the story gives the FBI and Afro-modernists the status of fully developed “characters,” complete with psychological idiosyncrasies and insecurities.  When Maxwell returns us to the main subject at hand, he is deftly able to move us back to the primary subject and shift fluidly from narrative to scholarly analysis and back again.  (Nonetheless, some may find the length of these digressions and the indecisiveness or inconsistency in authorial tone and voice and subject focus frustrating).
 
Woven through this eclectic, comprehensive study, then, is an epic noirish chronicle. The complex protagonists are represented by the cast of Afro-modernist writers struggling to “elevate or transcend their terms of engagement with the FBI, exposing unsightly facts about government spying while recycling them into imaginative fictions,” while the antagonists are represented by J. Edgar Hoover and the vast bureaucratic policing machine he constructed in part as a kind of jealous fascination of the artistic success and credibility of the very “subversive” element he sought to undermine (15).  The result of this hybrid endeavor is a thoroughly engaging look—though a somewhat uneven one—into this not-so-secret relationship.
 
Maxwell advances five broad theses.  The first argues that the FBI, and particularly Hoover’s hiring there in 1919, promoted a sustained interest in African American letters.  Initially this was a result of a deep suspicion of the New Negro and the literary self-refashioning of African Americans’s public image, but maintained and even intensified through the 1950s communist paranoia and through government interest in the Black Arts movement.  Maxwell notes Hoover’s expansion of the FBI’s own literary activities in the form of publications, reports, and crime bulletins, but also its development of a library, its involvement in the publishing industry, and its engagement in criticism to assess and monitor the content of, among other writings, those of Afro-modernism.  This “lit.-cop federalism,” as Maxwell terms it, was “state supervision pursued through a cluster of text-centered desires and activities ranging from the archival to the editorial, the interpretive to the authorial” (43).  The aim of “lit.-cop federalism” was to act as a counter-subversive force through public relations.  Hoover’s own book, Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in their Publications, written along with several ghostreaders (that is, FBI readers) in the Bureau, provided an examination of the New Negro with a veritable academic rigor unseen in non-black academic circles.  The very public rebuttal of the so-called subversive activities of Afro-modernist texts demonstrated a careful critical examination and classification of African American arts.  While the “critical glosses” of Hoover’s book were “thin, steeped in a stunted interpretive code in which literary interest [was] measured by moral or ideological admissibility,” his book nonetheless served, ironically, as a platform for diligent, serious research, even halting admiration, concerning the arts and political defiance.
 
This ironic devotion to Afro-modernism was linked to the successful evolution of the FBI, the subject of Maxwell’s second thesis.  In order to continue the relentless monitoring of African American letters as the century unfolded, the FBI became increasingly involved in pervasive and totalizing modes of mimicry and control.  These were used to justify and ultimately quarantine the African American arts as seditious.  Initially, during the Harlem Renaissance, the FBI engaged in what Maxwell calls “counterliterature”: a method borrowed from counter-espionage in which spies mimic the espionage of an enemy agency in order to reverse the intended goal of the original espionage.  Maxwell uncovers a steady effort by ghostreaders to employ a counterliterature that “digested and repurposed the public voices of Afro-modernist authors … [and] endeavored to police black writing with some of its own imaginative medicine and succeeded in enriching the FBI’s authority and ambition at almost every phase of the process” (62).
 
Maxwell notes a Foucauldian fashioning of the dissident subject throughout the files, constructing the Afro-modernist through criminological typing, often through the aid of a counterliterature whose purpose was to “out-write an entire ethnic modernism” (75).  Once again, the Hoover Bureau ironically shared with modernism a sense of the ideological efficacy of art.  The Orwellian expansion of the FBI’s counterliterature program by the time of the Cold War to what Maxwell calls “Total Literary Awareness” saw a program put in place to screen suspicious books prior to publication or plays prior to production.  And by the time of the Black Arts movement, the FBI’s first “counterintelligence program” (COINTELPRO), which started as an anti-communist effort in 1956, was used for audio-surveillance, monitoring author-audience interactions, book collections, and, in the case of political figures and groups, even writing poison pen-letters and provoking conflicts.  Yet to maintain this counterliterature required an unprecedented expertise in Afro-modernism that bordered on admiration.
 
All this is to say that the FBI acted as an influential and perhaps even the most dedicated critic of African American literature—which is Maxwell’s third thesis.  Maxwell says that in combing through the FOIA files one can’t help but note they are “works of literary commentary, state-subsidized explications debating informal curricula and obliquely bidding for interpretive dominance” (130).  This prompts Maxwell to ask to what degree these “critic-spies” shared methodology with literary critiques of the day.  Here Maxwell takes us on a long excursion into the scholarly debates within academia concerning the proper methods of literary criticism and how these contrasting methods came to be embodied by the two competing spy agencies, the OSS/CIA and the FBI.  While the CIA—in a shorthand caricature—thought of the typical FBI man as a less educated, lower class Irish-Catholic, the FBI saw the typical CIA man as a snobby, WASPish prep boy from the Ivy Leagues.  This cultural clash corresponds to a methodological difference in literary reading: the CIA tended toward New Critical readings (prevalent in the Ivy Leagues at the time) while the FBI was fashioned out of the historical biographical method common prior to the rise of the New Critics in the 1920s, as exemplified in Hoover’s aforementioned analysis of so-called race literature.  However, as the FBI became more obsessed with rooting out communist dissidents in America, their readings took on an increasingly cultural slant.  In this its methods resembled in some ways Marxist interpretative strategies.  Thus the interpretive approach that the FBI brought to bear on Afro-modernism was complex, utilizing formalist, bibliographic historicist and, interestingly, quasi-Marxist techniques.
 
The fourth thesis proclaims that the FBI was instrumental in blocking and forcing the movements of black artists in and out of America, thus helping to produce the internationalist character of Afro-modernism.  This effort amounts to what Maxwell calls “state-sponsored transnationalism” (21).  When African American writers left for Paris after World War II, for instance, many developed paranoia that everyone was being monitored and that some ex-pats had been coopted to spy upon each other.  The most prominent such writer was Richard Wright, whose poem “The FB Eye Blues” details the intolerable invasiveness of being spied upon (and is the source of Maxwell’s title).  Maxwell’s study of author files confirms the suspicions of these writers: indeed, the FBI cancelled passports, placed stop notices on specific travelers, influenced printing presses and publishers, and sought to control the movements and authorial output of Afro-modernists whenever it could to mitigate what it felt was the growing “Pan-Africanist” threat of these writers.  Thus, the FBI patrolled the US borders, denying some African American writers re-entry to the US and not letting others leave.  Failing to prevent the black diaspora, the FBI sought to manage it.
 
The ubiquitous presence of the FBI may have created unmeasurable deleterious effects on the literary output of Afro-modernists; however, awareness of its ghostreaders created a literary backlash, most often seen in unpublished materials.  Thus, Maxwell’s fifth and final thesis notes the way in which the FBI marks “a deep and characteristic vein in African American literature” (215).  The extent of negative FBI influence is hard to measure because it is expressed in silence: by “the number of novels abandoned or banned from bookstores and libraries; the number of early radical poems unreprinted or apologized for; the number of whole literary careers shortened or never started” (22).  These are some of the effects of ghostreading.  A number of memoirs and author files verify FBI interrogations and interviews with family members.  Since Afro-modernism, as Maxwell has defined the term, refers to “the diverse body of audacious and self-consciously modern black American writing,” it is no surprise that this literary style incorporates the consciousness of ghostreading into its literary expression (221).  Indeed, Maxwell argues that the Afro-modernists “‘pre-responded’ to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications” (222), and in this rival such postmodernists as DeLillo and Pynchon.
 
The fifth section of Maxwell’s book then explores a range of writings, covering different historical stages of Afro-modernism and the parallel growing surveillance programs of the FBI during the Hoover era.  His methodology is to read with an eye toward the ghostreading audience, a novel literary critical approach that seeks the effects of ghostreading on the manner and method of expression and the consequences of the conclusions to be drawn from such readings. To give one example, Maxwell reads Richard Wright’s unpublished Island of Hallucination as an anti-paranoid novel, directly confronting the various layers of monitoring to which he believed he was subject from various agencies.  This work becomes typical of an “antifile,” Maxwell’s term for a “novelized counterinvestigation that represents and recodes known forms of state surveillance” (258). While intriguing enough as a specific interpretive approach, the larger point for Maxwell is to show the necessity of including the omnipresence of the FBI in the shaping of Afro-modernism, including rethinking some of the interpretive stances of individual works vis-à-vis their FB Eyed contexts, and even “the value of integrating histories of state surveillance not only into Black Atlantic theory…but also into the narrower field of African American literary history” (251).
 
FB Eyes is a significant contribution to American literary study. Not only does the book research the extensive and deeply troubling invasiveness of the FBI into the lives of African Americans and its profound, even if nebulous, effects on Afro-modernism, it also demands a reshaping of the field itself to more formally and directly address the issue of state intrusion into the arts.  Indeed, the very form of his study—a kind of postmodern collage of theoretical methods, authorial voices and narrative organization—suggests a novel kind of literary criticism in its own right.  What remains perhaps most important here, as Maxwell very rightly notes, at a time where revelations of vast surveillance programs of American citizens has come to light through Edward Snowden’s leaked CIA documents, understanding the continuing interaction of the spy agencies and cultural production seems perpetually relevant.

A review of Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Cambridge UP, 2015.

In recent scholarship about contemporary literature, it has become in vogue to declare the death of postmodernism as an appropriate periodizing break for thinking of the contemporary as a unique, twenty-first-century category. In her first monograph, Rachel Greenwald Smith contributes to this conversation about “the contemporary,” but unlike some, she offers up the economic (and therefore, political and social) practices of neoliberalism as the parameters for defining contemporary literature and its various forms. Smith further defines neoliberalism with respect to affect, namely, that neoliberalism’s relationship to affect presents much more starkly than affective conditions in other periods precisely because of the unprecedented expansion of privatization, free market ideology, and individualism that has infiltrated both the external economy and the internal lives of its subjects. Many scholars of contemporaneity have connected neoliberalism to affect; however, Smith highlights the productivity of literary “feelings that are not as easily identifiable as such to readers trained to look for emotional payoff for their readerly investments” (33). In so doing, Smith maintains that in contemporary literature, there are affective modes that cannot be reduced to entrepreneurial individualism.
 
In Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, Smith argues convincingly against the “affective hypothesis” popular in literary studies. Smith defines this trend in literary criticism as “the belief that literature is at its most meaningful when it represents and transmits the emotional specificity of personal experience,” a theory Smith decidedly opposes, arguing that we do not require the presence of affect in literary texts in order to learn to be unique human beings, but instead, we need it so that we – as readers, subjects, citizens – can recognize neoliberalism’s impact on the human condition more collectively (1).
 
Smith explains that the prevalence of the affective hypothesis in criticism has surged under neoliberalism, not only because of the corresponding resurgence of books representing common personal feelings (such as fear, grief, happiness, hope, disappointment, and sadness)  alongside the exponential rise of neoliberal policies, but also because of the spread of the neoliberal market mindset into everyday lives. In the lived neoliberal experience, “feelings frequently become yet another material foundation for market-oriented behavior: emotions are acquired, invested, traded, and speculated upon” (6). Throughout her study, Smith’s smart and consistent deployment of the vocabulary of economic policy when describing emotions enhances her argument structurally, bolstering the connections between economics and literature. The way to combat this neoliberal, investment-oriented attitude toward feelings, Smith proposes, is via the writing and subsequent reading of literary works that employ what she terms “impersonal feelings.” Importantly, “impersonal feelings” are still feelings (and implied here is that Smith sees feelings as essential to literature to some degree), but feelings which are less recognizable, more complex, and difficult to assign individually, thereby challenging neoliberalism’s hegemony in our contemporary moment. These impersonal feelings are what allow novels to move away from the model of reader-character identification, instead providing a space for a wider range of affects.
 
Subsequently, the first chapter dives much deeper into case studies of both personal (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) and impersonal feelings (Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions), the literary difference between them, and the reasons for Smith’s reliance on this terminology. Before she does so, however, Smith recalls the recent debates about novelistic experimentation between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus and posits that experimental form on its own is not enough to disturb the neoliberal model, and that recent tendencies toward formal experimentation are not “merely a result of the march of literary history, but rather [they reflect] the growth of neoliberalism during the period” (33). However, Smith maintains hope for formal innovation and even for novels more generally. In fact, each chapter’s structure – a presentation of one complicitly neoliberal novel countered by another that better represents impersonal feelings – highlights Smith’s hopes for contemporary literature’s political potential. Ultimately, this lack of doom and gloom strengthens her work. Because neoliberalism holds so tightly that any movement outside of its reign seems implausible, Smith’s ability to posit literary solutions beyond the problem and its symptoms offers a refreshing relief.
 
Smith begins with The Road, a minimalist work sans punctuation, which, like all of the novels considered, is experimental to some degree. It would seem that the sparse details of McCarthy’s minimalism might remove the threat of neoliberal personal identification with characters, which, in Smith’s view, repeats and helps to further internalize the affective hypothesis and its relation to neoliberal conditions. And yet, Smith argues, what actually occurs is an even more intense attachment to the father and son protagonists because they are all we have to gravitate toward, thereby creating “a contract with the reader…not by producing an engaging plot, or offering much in the way of concrete and applicable forms of instruction, but by eliciting intense emotional engagement out of readers and returning to those readers a sense of emotional connection with two particular, irreplaceable people” (46). The Book of Illusions, on the other hand, operates under a detached tone that strips the personal element out of the reader-text relationship and “tells a series of stories that chronicle experiences of the loss of self, affective investments in works of art, and momentary connections with others” (54). This, in turn, elicits a more complex – because it is not readily identifiable – emotional response. And so, these more distanced, nuanced emotions (often having to do with the feeling of being unable to identify one’s feelings) are privileged by Smith over those more easily identifiable and more common emotions like sadness, anger, and disappointment.
 
Chapters 2 and 3 shift away from general definitions of key terms and toward the more specific considerations of the 9/11 novel and what it means to read (and write) like an entrepreneur. Smith aligns with other scholars of contemporary literature by zeroing in on the events of September 11, 2001 as one possible periodizing starting point for the category of not just contemporary, but also neoliberal literature. For Smith, the novels which forcefully imply that 9/11 was a tragic, but “transformative” event, fail to simultaneously acknowledge the exponential advancement and expansion of neoliberal ideologies put into effect in the aftermath of the attack, when citizens were most vulnerable to such manipulation (61). Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close serves as the case study for the type of novel that presents 9/11 as such a disruptive event. A less neoliberal novel, however, would position the attacks not as a break from the norm, but as one event in a series of already existing geopolitical conditions. The more inclusive and understanding novel – Smith suggests – would be like the much less well known The Exquisite by Laird Hunt, which provides “no tonal guide” for affective response to 9/11, and which, although the narrative commences on this same date, does not centralize “‘the recent events downtown’” (71). Therefore, this better represents the un-representability not of the trauma of 9/11, but of “the intricacy of the web from which it emerges and causes to vibrate in turn” (75).
 
Just as Smith outlines the limits of writing about trauma’s emotional impact in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 depicts the limits on the “freedom of choice” that neoliberalism purportedly values. In fact, the supposed choices of everyday life appear so expansive because we have been led to believe that choices and emotions need to be rational. Contrary to this, of course, we are often aware of how the choices we make are attached to emotions, emotions easily manipulated by economic and political forces. Smith connects this tension to literature by comparing two works that present its readers with choices – Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. Smith reads Heartbreaking Work as a self-aware choose-your-own-adventure story that, despite its footnotes, parentheticals, and breakings of the fourth wall, still leads us to the bottom line: a distinct emotional identification with the narrator and sympathy for his struggle to raise his younger brother.
 
No matter whether or not we choose to skip the portions of Eggers’s text that he encourages us to skip, Smith argues, each reader reaches the same affective conclusion, and thus arrives at a redemptive identification that shores up the neoliberal subject. Unlike in previous chapters, here Smith gives away – albeit subtly – her own personal feelings toward the book, calling it “captivating” and “an extraordinary reading experience” (88). Once this rare moment reveals itself, one wishes Smith would delve further into similar readerly emotions in other sections as a means by which to contemplate her own personal feelings against those of other reviewers, critics, and readers. Jennifer Doyle, in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, spends significant time grappling with the emotional relationship between author and reader, noting that emotion is “where ideology does its most devastating work” (xi). But, as Catherine Zuromskis notes in her review of Doyle’s book, “this fact does not make our feelings any less authentically or individually felt.” Because we get a glimpse of this in Smith’s reading of Eggers, we wish for more of this kind of interpretation of contemporary fiction, one that considers the emotions of the critic as participating in and susceptible to the same neoliberal, emotional attachment she warns against.
 
Smith does not divulge as much attachment to The Age of Wire and String, which nonetheless, in its opacity and purposefully difficult reading experience productively offers “an awareness that reader mastery is impossible,” an awareness which is “created not for its own sake – not to make readers feel powerless or passive – but as an attempt to create the specific feeling of what it feels like to think outside of one’s forms of daily awareness” (94). This is, in turn, one example of “impersonal feelings.” Part of Smith’s analysis of these two works rests on the idea of the “contract” between reader and writer, which she mentions earlier in a discussion of Franzen. Is the novel a contract between reader and writer? If novels are both an object in the marketplace and a work of art, what responsibility do authors have to the reader, to themselves as individual art producers, and to our atomized, neoliberal society? If Eggers enters into a personal affective contract and Marcus specifically chooses not to write in a definable way, aren’t their contracts just different? These questions, of course, subscribe to an understanding of aesthetics in which art is always under contract—a fundamentally neoliberal thought process. But since Smith offers a non-neoliberal alternative for feelings, can there also be a non-neoliberal loophole out of contract aesthetics?
 
Instead, in the final chapter, Smith takes a turn toward ecology, which she alerts us to in the introduction, arguing that unlike most other systems that have adopted and adapted to neoliberal market ideology, ecosystems have resisted even as the novel has continued to have difficulty expressing non-human relationships. Despite Smith’s earlier notice, the fourth chapter’s topic comes as a surprise in its intense focus on ecocriticism and environmentalism in literature, namely “the desire to represent ecological thinking as an alternative to neoliberal thinking on the one hand, and the danger that exists in making ecosystems the subjects of human narratives, and therefore domesticating them, on the other” (103), especially since none of the other chapters rely on a theme as external as this non-human framework. Smith’s close readings of Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream countered with Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker are very detailed and poignant, but feel out of place in the greater context of the monograph. Smith concludes: “Encounters with texts … do not merely represent non-human others, nor does the system by which we encounter literary works simply mimic an ecological system. Literature is part of our ecosystem” (126). While it might be easy to agree and see great value in this, it is more difficult to assert that Smith fully earns this closing thought given the lack of buildup to this chapter’s central point. While we can see how ecological thinking functions as an alternative to economic thinking in its broader consideration of social context, affect’s role in this continuum remains a bit murky.
 
In spite of the last chapter’s deviation, Smith’s book makes important contributions to affect theory, contemporary literary studies, and cultural studies more broadly, while also offering useful definitions for thinking about literary history and categorization. While the book takes on the political monster of neoliberalism, it shies away from race and gender, the latter of which has been particularly integral to the development of affect theory. Most of the works considered are by well-known male authors, and so Smith’s defense of her “eclectic” choices – which doesn’t appear until the epilogue – comes too late (127). Some authors who would have fit into her affectual, experimental framework include Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead, not to mention authors outside the scope of the United States, such as Roberto Bolaño, Tom McCarthy, or Zadie Smith. The focus on predominantly white, male writers is especially odd given race and gender’s intersections and interplay with neoliberal policy. Nevertheless, Affect and American Literature successfully and deftly portrays and classifies contemporary literature’s engagements with affect under neoliberalism. Moreover, the work challenges current critical practices by offering an alternative to the affect hypothesis and by remaining hopeful that literature can enact change in our privatized present.

A review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012.

Richard J. Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1952) provides the classic framework for any scholarly discussion of conspiracy and paranoia in the United States. In his essay, Hofstadter reminds us of the self-assured heroism implicit in the conspiratorial mindset—how the paranoiac understands conspiracy solely in “apocalyptic terms,” and how he “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds . . . manning the barricades of civilization” (29-30). Scholarship on conspiracy is thus an exceptionally tone-sensitive genre. Write too modestly and the argument will fail to catch; write too strongly and you risk enacting the same paranoia you seek to gauge. Restraint can make for unconvincing prose, but even worse, discernibly paranoid criticism can end up, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has remarked, “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). In The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (2012), Timothy Melley manages these demands deftly.
 
The conspiracy theorist, as Hofstadter notes, aims toward the reduction of global systems into sinister, coherent plots managed by a handful of individuals “not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history” (32). Melley, however, is more interested in explicating discursive processes than in pinning major cultural and political developments on a few persons or sources; he defines “the covert sphere” as “a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state” (5). Melley contends that the US government’s efforts to silence or censor journalism after WWII implicitly authorized only select, speculative media—postmodern fiction, in large part—to probe the covert action of the state. This, however, would begin a vicious feedback loop. While writers such as Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Tim O’Brien, Joan Didion, and E.L Doctorow would deploy “postmodern epistemological skepticism” to critique state secrecy (10), so too would the Cold War US state erect comparable “epistemological barriers to knowing the work of the state” (105). By investing his prose in this intricate, two-way relationship between state and text—rather than proposing a model of cultural and social development engineered only from highest government offices—Melley effectively evades the self-aggrandizing, me-against-the-world stereotype of thinkers involved in conspiracy theories. Claims that could easily come off as conspiratorial—for instance, that “geopolitical melodramas” such as Fox’s 24 underlie the twenty-first century discourse on national security (219)—are rendered reasonable and compelling. Readers hardly suspect the author as paranoid himself.
 
Melley’s text seamlessly weaves together decades of American studies scholarship on the Cold War and its sociological and aesthetic repercussions. In the context of current scholarship, one might think of The Covert Sphere as a companion to and even an expansion of Daniel Grausam’s On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), which investigates what exactly the fictional narrative can and cannot articulate in the context of mutually assured destruction. Comparatively, one can think of The Covert Sphere as an institutional parallel to Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993), an analysis of the ways that theorists (as opposed to novelists) offer a cult of personality and power over knowledge in response to a world that could, at any given moment, erupt into nuclear warfare. Melley’s work follows another acclaimed historicization of fiction in the Cold War era, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), which chronicles the advent of American MFA programs in the mid- to late-twentieth century. While McGurl speaks mainly to the ways in which the Cold War allowed universities to both philosophically and financially seize on “the linked values of fictionality and creativity” and thus mark their investment in “vivacious American individualism” (McGurl 265), Melley sketches the overarching, epistemological structures that govern such transactions. Indeed, one of the most admirable features of Melley’s prose is how infrequently it slips into dull taxonomies (an implicit danger for authors who try to extract national-scale principles of knowledge from literary texts). While Melley might simply have offered a theory of the Cold War narrative by pointing to a number of texts that exemplify his claim, he instead cultivates his concepts by way of close readings that comingle and comprise his greater theses. For example, case studies on brainwashing as a cultural fascination following the Korean War, Didion’s journalistic fictions, and the use of false documents in the Rosenberg trial all culminate in convincing articulations of grander cultural processes that bear on knowledge in both public and governmental domains.
 
Melley’s work finds use beyond literary and historicist contexts in women’s and gender studies: he argues that the conditions of knowledge prompted by the Cold War state depend on a feminization of national discourse through the stereotypically female mode of speculation. By licensing postmodern fiction and film as speculative mediums, the paternalistic Cold War state sought to domesticate the public and public channels of information. This would place civilians in a categorically feminine “position of unknowing, ‘safe’ from the rough-and-tumble realm of ‘real’ political struggle” (Melley 68). In one of Melley’s more astute observations, he notes that contemporary video games such as Call of Duty seize on the corresponding opportunity to “re-masculinize” the young American male through the first-person shooter (25-26). Melley’s work thus stands at the intersection of American studies, media studies, literary criticism, and critical theory, adept at disciplinary and interdisciplinary efforts alike.
 
Although Melley’s project—mapping how “the Cold War security state transformed the conditions of social knowledge in a way that would later become a topic of central interest in postmodern narrative”—requires him to borrow plentifully from the canonical theorists of postmodernism, he sees the conceptual revision of postmodernism as a task beyond the scope of his book (73). Yet, because Melley takes such care to avoid shattering our fundamental understandings of culture and politics, he ends up shying away from the major discursive shift that his work is capable of fulfilling. Melley explicitly states his aversion to reconciling deviating views of postmodernism; rather than “offer[ing] a new general theory,” he instead chooses to “concentrate on what seems largely settled about postmodernism” (36). But so little actually is. The elements of postmodernism Melley calls upon most confidently—reflexivity, skepticism, fragmentation, and the distortion of reality and history—are all debatably more modernist than postmodern (if not simply old hat). Further, the works from which Melley derives these concepts often hinge methodologically on the anecdote or case study. Indeed, the theorist of postmodernism often risks missing the forest for the Bonaventure Hotel. How easy it is, for instance, to take Baudrillard’s reading of Disneyland in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) as emblematic of the sociocultural totality.
 
Yet, by undertaking a historical and international-scale analysis of the cultural and political repercussions of (supposedly) postmodern concepts, Melley has the opportunity to reconsider postmodernism with a sense of legitimacy and durability few writers achieve. As Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden have noted, before the culture wars of the 1990s, scholars tended to treat the dominant elements of postmodernism as invariably pliable, dictated by the epistemological plasticity of poststructuralist thinking (292). Additionally, for some scholars, the recent “temporal and spatial expansions” of modernist studies into the late twentieth century threaten the possibility of a distinct postmodernism (Mao and Walkowitz 737). Melley’s work could undercut both threats; together, the historical bedrock and cultural span of his analysis have the potential to reorient postmodernism as a definite and definable period and concept. Even so, readers hoping for a new theoretical take on postmodernism might find themselves justifiably underwhelmed by The Covert Sphere.
 
Melley’s work does, however, mount an implicit challenge to a contemporary understanding of one major mode of postmodern literature: American metafiction. In David Foster Wallace’s emphatic call to revive and augment realism in American fiction writing, metafiction emblematizes a turn away from the dilemmas of intrapersonal engagement and toward irony and self-celebration. Neil Schmitz’s 1974 contention that the primary ambition of metafiction is to spotlight the writer’s own “conception of literature, his sense of himself as a writer and as a human being” foreshadows Wallace’s conception explicitly (212). A major argument of Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1997) can be summed up accordingly: by making narrative content out of the inner-structures of fiction writing, metafiction turns its back on the human dilemmas (and, perhaps, corresponding political outcomes) better explored in a realist aesthetic. “[I]f Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it,” writes Wallace (34). Since the turn of the century, authors of more recent literatures have taken less than kindly to the mode. Zadie Smith speaks for the field when she describes metafiction as “relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules, and dismissed, by our most prominent public critics, as a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart” (74).
 
Reading American metafiction in one such postmodernity module, Melley arrives at a set of political imperatives not typically allied with reflexive narrative, and even absolves metafiction from the charge that it lacks humanistic conviction. For Melley, the incessant reflexivity evinced by metafictionists such as Coover, Atwood (in The Handmaiden’s Tale, especially), and Barth serves to mirror and critique the distorted epistemological conditions perpetuated by the Cold War state in its efforts to veil covert actions and obscure trails of accountability. While Melley’s analysis of Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning makes for an obvious case given President Nixon’s role as narrator, his brief segue into Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968) more impressively enlivens the political valences of a reflexive fiction we could otherwise consider solely self-involved. While readers require little assistance understanding “Lost in the Funhouse” as rumination on the art of fiction writing, Melley makes a creative move in interpreting the narrative’s experimental and often dysfunctional structure as the product of a Cold War epistemology fortified by national policy. Tracing the narrator’s aversion to causal explanation and linear narrative progress, Melley draws a striking similarity between the conditions of knowledge maintained by the narrator and those maintained by Cold War America. Through a narratologically-oriented reading, Melley theorizes a binding relationship between the story’s WWII setting and the divergence the story makes from the typical narrative arc (exemplified in “Lost in the Funhouse” by Freytag’s Pyramid). What “may seem a strikingly ahistorical and playful metafiction,” Melley claims, “thus turns out to be substantially influenced by the problem of Cold War public knowledge” (170). In this sense, the metafictionist designs a sort of training ground in the processes of reading and interpretation for recognizing the epistemological exploitations of the covert state. Barth’s story makes visible American metafiction’s commitment to enacting and exposing the state’s subtle manipulations of the public’s capacity for knowledge. With this reading in mind, many of American fiction’s greatest narcissists turn out to be undercover activists, dedicated to exposing the regulation of discursive possibility. And while Melley refrains from casting the repercussions of his interpretation as such, The Covert Sphere, as it spotlights the political values of “Lost in the Funhouse,” effectually challenges one of the most deeply ingrained understandings of American metafiction.
 
Given Melley’s major contention that “Cold War secrecy has made it difficult to know what is true or to narrate events as history,” his work risks an obvious (and perhaps tiresome) contradiction (28). If during the Cold War and after, “the truth-value of fiction sometimes trumps that of narrative history,” then Melley’s own attempt at historicization should be considered vulnerable to the same Cold War epistemology that renders historicization suspect (144). Melley, however, anticipates this challenge, especially in his interpretation of the 2002, 2004, and 2007 Bourne films. Calling attention to the faith that the film series places in restoring “the wounded public sphere in light of publicity,” Melley realizes how such efforts can have “the paradoxical effect of inviting its viewers to dismiss covert action as an exaggeration that can, in any given case, be corrected by the restoration of the democratic public sphere” (174). Indeed, no monograph (nor any other medium, for that matter) can undo decades of epistemological regulation by simply shining a light on those procedures. Any diachronic analysis on Melley’s topics that claims historiography as an unproblematic, remedial effort shows only naiveté. This is a lesson well learned from Alan Nadel, who argues in Containment Culture that the postmodern period has encouraged us “to regard our historical narratives as consumer choices” (294-95). Following this point, Melley’s admitted vulnerability to the Cold War’s historiographical paradox becomes a marker of mature scholarship. The Covert Sphere reminds us that no theory of history or culture can announce itself from beyond the strictures of a given discourse or historical context.
 
Taking into account the fact that literary critics now find themselves in an era of methodological proliferation, Melley’s brazen reflexivity makes for a timely example. As scholars over the last decade have tried to move past a hermeneutics of suspicion through methods such as “surface reading” (Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus), “distant reading” (Franco Moretti), and “neophenomenology” (Rita Felski), Melley’s admission that his work remains directed by the same structures it hopes eventually to shake off reminds us how difficult it is to repudiate a discourse without simultaneously reinforcing its parameters. In this way, Melley’s self-conscious historiography harkens back to the work of Guy Debord, who once contended that structuralism cannot effectively refute the work of the state because it is, in form, critique “underwritten by the state” itself (142). Might the same be said of recent disavowals of suspicious reading? By casting suspicion as the major methodological antagonist, have scholars only bolstered suspicion as literary and cultural studies’ dominant disposition? By encouraging such questions, Melley gives his readers a principle for the evaluation of any seemingly radical injunction into the historiographical, literary, or critical discourses of the present.
 
Thus, the necessary imperative Melley leaves us with—while solidifying that “we have institutionalized undemocratic means of preserving our democracy” (222)—is to ask which methods of critique, if any, lie outside the purview of the covert sphere. Which tools have been sanctioned by the very political, institutional, or canonical forces we seek to probe or repudiate? While these questions remain to be settled (and cannot be settled by any one scholar or individual discipline), Melley does an important service by initiating such self-assessment and, perhaps more importantly, by offering an exemplar of how to proceed without lapsing into paranoia.
 

Introduction

China’s neoliberal reforms in the 1990s resulted in a rapid increase in layoffs and a tremendous expansion of so-called “disadvantaged groups” (Ruoshi qunti弱势群体) in a short period of time. The living situation of the “understrata” (Diceng底层) also gradually became a hot topic in Chinese art. In 2004, the concept of “Understrata Literature”（diceng wenxue底层文学）emerged to define a host of works reminiscent of the leftist literature popular in China from the 1920s to the 1940s. In the case of film, the story is different. Starting in the late ‘80s, Sixth Generation auteurs first focused on the anomie and angst of intellectual figures, signaling a break not only from officially sanctioned, mainstream production, but also from the Fifth Generation directors who mostly worked in the state-sponsored studio systems and cast their cameras on the national past in order to orchestrate legendary stories. Carrying on the spirit and technique of the neorealist Italian cinema of the late 1940s and the French New Wave of the late 1950s, these directors are considered more “avant-garde” than their predecessors. Understandably, then, some of them also turned their gazes on the economically weak and unprotected. Since these directors proclaim that “my camera does not lie,” this move is easy to understand: they aim to show life “as it is,” with the assistance of a documentary impulse, in contrast to the epic-oriented narration of Fifth Generation auteurs that often allegorizes the legendary fables of ancient China.[1] For the purposes of realism, the lamentable living situation of the socially marginalized is a convenient subject. The first film to treat this subject was Rain Clouds over Wushan (Wushan Yunyu巫山云雨, also known as In Expectation), written by famed avant-garde writer Zhu Wen (朱文 b. 1967)[2] and directed by key avant-gardist Zhang Ming (章明b. 1967).[3] Since its release in 1996, the film has steadily gained in reputation as part of the Chinese avant-guard cinematic movement.[4]
 
The movie has a tripartite narrative structure, a form frequently used in international art films but that had not been used by other Chinese Sixth Generation auteurs. Two plotlines follow two characters whose experiences seemingly do not intersect or overlap with each other until the third section, which also helps to explain earlier weird and uncanny phenomena. Meanwhile, each section focuses on one group of people, all in their mid-thirties. The critic Nick Kaldis notes that within this general framework,
 

the most notable features of the film’s structure are … numerous scenes with recurring events and motifs, which conjure up inexplicable connections between characters and events, endowing the film with a mysterious, ambiguously symbolic quality that resists chronological narrative explanation and easy paraphrase. (61)

This results in a strong effect of defamiliarization,[5] reminiscent of Brecht’s “Verfremdung” or estrangement.[6] In defining its “suggestive, imagistic style” as “paratactic cinematics,” Kaldis argues that the movie presents
 

an exploration into the relationship between the destruction of the local ecosystem and the psychosexual conflicts of residents being displaced by that destruction, and almost all of the film’s events arise out of this overarching structural relationship between national development and individual sexuality. (58)

In his view, “in its uncompromising attempt to explore repressed and disavowed sexual conflicts in contemporary Chinese society, and in linking disruptions in human desire and sexuality to the destruction of the environment and communities,” the film is “doubly radical” (58).
 
Sexual issues are indeed foregrounded in and central to the story. Yin Hong notes that the film “uses a nearly emotionless factual documentation and the ‘disastrous’ metaphor of the Three Gorges relocation as a backdrop … to narrate the ‘sexual’ core of the existential states of a few average men and women” (91). But why is a sexual complex approached and exploited here as the “core” of the living conditions of these Chinese people? Is it simply something that we are familiar with, namely, a cinematic expression of the pansexualism of Freudian theory? In publicity material for the film, the director explains that “In the time of peace and prosperity in which we live, many people’s emotional desires cannot be satisfied. Our film is concerned with this fundamental aspect of existence” (Beijing 1). But instead of showing “peace and prosperity,” the movie exemplifies the rampant human casualties of the destruction of housing and the impending catastrophes of physical displacement—and under this shadow, the psychological turmoil caused by the lamentable living conditions of the subaltern.
 
On the surface, the psyches of the individual characters are a result of “a traumatic experience of environmental destruction on a massive, historically unprecedented and highly disorienting scale” that renders them “alienated from [their] own environment, experience, and desire, resulting in a confusion of real and imagined relations to other people” (Kaldis 59). Yet the theme of alienation aside, my reading of the cinematic text and its allegorical texture finds that the “traumatic experience” is brought about less by the unprecedented environmental destruction than by the post-revolutionary, de-collectivized society in which the atomized working class is marginalized to be the subaltern. The highlighted omnipotence and omnipresence of physical desires, meanwhile, are merely due to the enchantment of the logic of commodity exchange at a certain historical moment, an enchantment yet to be realized consciously by the characters, by the director, and by society in general. Seen this light, the film is not exactly, as Kaldis writes,
 

an allegory of any nation experiencing rapid, large-scale development, in which the government-propagated ideology of the unquestionable good of economic “progress” and “modernization” is shown to be the cause of irreversible ecological damage and the obliteration of historically-rich local communities, bringing alienation, rupture, and confusion to the inner and outer worlds of the very citizens whose lives it is ostensibly improving. (72)

Rather, in its symptomatic (re)presentation, projection, and displacement of the illusionary expectations of bourgeois elites (to become the desires of average citizens, particularly subaltern figures), the film becomes a social-historical fable dealing with the post-socialist conditions of China in the early stage of market economy, when the nation bid farewell to the planned, abstinent economic system of the revolutionary period. In accordance with this subject matter, the film applies heavy doses of symbolism, naturalism and hyper-realism. And in this way, it is a postmodern film with a modernist and realist facade, demonstrating that postmodern culture in China is essentially predicated upon the post-socialist, political-economic regime, and premised on its sensory machine.

Portraying the Working Class in the Era of Depoliticization

At the beginning of each of the three sections, captions briefly introduce the characters and the origin of the drama. The first two sections follow the two protagonists, who represent the working class in the contemporary era of depoliticization, and who seemingly care for nothing political but their own physical desires and individual concerns.
 
The first part follows a prologue in which the title appears after strange music reminiscent of the uncanny rhythm of a Hitchcock movie; then a close-up portrays the protagonist pulling a rope, followed by a long shot of him returning to his nearby workroom in a lighthouse perched over a river, in which he appears merely as a small figure. The caption reads: “Mai Qiang, thirty-years old, a local river signalman. In the afternoon, Ma Bing brings Lili in.” The camera then turns to Mai Qiang, again in the room, painting something.
 
A solitary man, Mai is the only staff in this signal station in the town of Wushan, a dull little burg located along the Yangtze River; and implicitly, he is the only resident of the isolated island. The establishing shots show that his job is to receive calls about relevant navigation conditions and then relay the messages to other related parties and change the signal flag. Still a bachelor, his life is listless and short of interests. His only pastime seems to be ink drawings, yet he uses the works he creates merely as toilet paper: his distraction is simultaneously a kind of self-annihilation. We do not know how long has he been entrenched in this living situation, which seems to be the norm for him. Considering that in the socialist period, workers were assigned to a “work unit” in which they were expected to engage in lively (and sometimes very tense) political life, Mai’s solitary life in the dilapidated house is possible only after the collectivist socialist culture had gradually come to an end after the reform period began.
 
Dull and colorless life looks burdensome; it needs some sort of stimulation. One day, Mai’s buddy Ma Bing and his “girlfriend” Lili drop by for a visit. Apparently, Ma brings Lili just to entertain Mai, since he insinuates this to Mai and arranges for the two to spend the night together. Yet Mai shows no interest in Lili. Let us look carefully at this section filled merely with bland and tasteless episodes that nevertheless have much more allegorical import than realistic significance. A de-socialized worker living in an isolated station is just like a prisoner in a wasteland. It seems that Mai has neither parents nor any other relatives, and he rarely contacts his colleagues and friends on his own initiative. Only occasionally, one or two friends pay him a visit – at least this is what we see in this cinematic time-space. In effect, this is the imaginary situation of an atomized individual who lives not in the real world, but in the philosophical world of deliberation. This is not to deny that many members of the working class in post-revolutionary, de-collectivized China have been extremely atomized and marginalized into being the subaltern; but what the movie highlights is that in this hypothetical state, none but the “natural” desires for food and sex exist, making this a hyper-alienated condition. Mai’s work is uninteresting, and his distraction after work – or rather, his major occupation during his working hours – is boring. He draws, yet he has no passion for it. His friend Ma Bing comforts him by saying that his “masterpieces” should not be used as toilet paper but could be brought to Beijing for sale: he offers Mai Qiang a meaning for this dispirited life.
 
Yet a human being of the real world would not be used to this hypothetical vacuum state, so as soon as Mai Qiang returns to the living room, he turns on the TV. It broadcasts a piece of news about the Chinese premier at a commencement ceremony, announcing the building of the Three Gorges Dam. Later on, we see that Mai turns on the TV punctually, deliberately watching the CCTV news. Does he care about national affairs, or is he just concerned about the imminent emigration that will impinge on his life and on the life of the tens of thousands of local residents? We cannot tell from the visual scenes. The TV screen usually flickers, indicating the dysfunction of signals, but also implicitly referring to the station’s run-down condition. On the other hand, the flickering also seems to serve as a pretext for the inability to present Mai’s living conditions in a realistic way. In this light, I suggest that the representation of Mai’s environmental alienation here is incomprehensive and partial: these existential conditions are presented much more as the consequence of an “event” psychologically felt, than as authentic reality per se.
 
How great is the force of the “event”? And how does it bring about such psychological turmoil for the masses that it even verges on trauma? Fredric Jameson’s lesson is worth mentioning here:
 

What I have called its meaning … [lies] in the problem of the indeterminacy itself and that of assessing the nature of an external force that does something to you, but which, by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your own and cannot be matched, by definition also transcends your capacity to understand it or to conceptualize — better still, to represent — it. (Geopolitical 88)

This event is both the background of the characters and their inexorable life per se. It becomes the subtext for understanding the characters’ psychologies and behaviors, and why they are represented as such. This subtext is not shown directly not because it is unimportant, but because the populace have become used to it and are barely able to think about it outside of its circumscription. Consequently, although the film is unfamiliar enough technically, it is not the Brechtian effects of de-familiarization that encourage us to reflect upon reality. We must locate the reality of the “event” in the clues or traces of the diegetic space; and the film ostensibly encourages us to search for this truth with its uncanny score and reversed and interspersed storyline. Although this event is seemingly the ongoing destruction of the town and the impending doom of the locals, or development-as-destruction, in fact it is much larger in scope and much more complicated in nature.
 

Soon after they arrive, in the dining room Ma Bing explains his and Mai Qiang’s relationship to Lili. It turns out that Mai was his master, and they had been “brothers of the working class.” Towards the end of the movie, he asks Mai to leave his job, go into business, or at least find a new job. Here, Ma’s urging partially reveals the truth of the epoch: the two “main melodies” or alternatives after the historical event of the birth of the market economy are to “plunge into the commercial sea” or to look for a job that can satisfy one’s personal interests. Both sharply contrast with what Mai Qiang is doing now as “a cog in the party’s (or the nation’s) machine” (a popular slogan in the Maoist period calling for selfless devotion to the socialist enterprise), namely, a job that satisfies the national interest. Although Mai Qiang repudiates this supplication by arguing that he has no interest in the two sorts of work Ma Bing proposes, we do not know whether this is due to his lack of ability or to his sense of responsibility to the socialist ethic. But because of his rejection of the reasonable proposal, he appears less than human in an era of individualism.
 
Consequently, he must be enlightened. Ma Bing, who now becomes a Tom and Jerry character treating life as a game, is the candidate. To dispel Mai’s feeling of loneliness, Ma brings Lili to look upon his erstwhile master. We are not sure whether this is out of “class feeling” or “personal concern,” for we are not told anything about their past experience. For instance, we are not informed what Mai Qiang the master had taught Ma Bing and what kind of friendship they had developed before, which seems to be a past that needs not be recalled. From his emotionless face, we do not know how Mai Qiang feels even about this visit, as if it is a dispensable move that disturbs his religious-styled cultivation. What the audience witnesses are their behaviors on a superficial level: Ma Bing demands that Mai Qiang move out of his house to make room for him and Lili, and then arranges for Lili to sleep with Mai Qiang. Whether this proposal emerges only on the spur of the moment or was planned earlier, it is no surprise that the apparently ascetic Mai has no interest in Lili. Instead of making love, the two go out to the seaside without Ma Bing’s noticing. Witnessing Lili’s excitement over a passing steamboat, Mai still looks cold and numb. In this regard, the protagonist Mai Qiang indeed looks less than human. Yet the next day, when Lili asks for payment from Ma Bing for her work, Mai, facing Lili’s earnest eye contact, responds evasively to Ma’s interrogation about whether he has slept with her.[7]
 
The second section caption tells us about the second protagonist: “Chen Qing, a hotel receptionist, is preparing her second marriage.” Chen is a single mother with a young child living a lamentable life, for her salary from her job is meager. When she appears, she is undertaking her daily business: holding a signboard, she eagerly solicits the patronage of tourists coming to see the famous gorges before they are submerged. She proclaims that the hotel is state-run so its charge is reasonable and low, and it has everything necessary. The last point is not true: when the visitors follow her to the hotel, they find that it is indeed a cheap roadhouse, yet it has few facilities. This does not mean Chen is a swindler without a conscience; it merely indicates the metamorphosis of workers of SOEs (state-owned enterprises) as well as the run-down conditions of such enterprises following the gigantic event of an emerging market economy. The SOEs at the time still had their reputation compared to private-owned businesses; yet with the new market economy, they did not get enough support from the state, and so were mostly entrenched in a difficult financial situation, which forced staff like Chen Qing to find clients by any means.
 
Situated in this depoliticized state, the leaders of the SOEs or the work units, who used to be (or were supposed to be) not only political leaders but also moral paragons in the Maoist era, also lost their aura – moral integrity, personal appeal, and even political authority. Lao Mo, the manager of the hotel, imposes a sexual relation on Chen Qing by taking advantage of her financial difficulty. Though he keeps this secret carefully, nevertheless his ambiguous attitude is detected by a staff member, who then scolds him for accosting Chen Qing and asks him leave for his own office. The erstwhile socialist work unit has completely lost its political nature in this post-revolutionary era; its members work there merely to earn a living.
 
Around this time, a female colleague introduces a partner for Chen Qing. Though the man is quite ill, the marriage is seen as a viable choice for Chen as a widow raising a child. Yet Chen curiously delays the marriage interview (later on we will know that she is waiting for Mai Qiang). Nevertheless, she has decided to sever her ties with Lao Mo. Yet after she fulfills the latter’s desire on the condition that this is the last time, Lao Mo changes his mind the next day and insists on maintaining their relations, which causes her great anger. Still, she needs to take care of her job after the emotional explosion. Living in a garret, she has to trek a meandering road to reach her house every day, which symbolizes her difficult life experience.
 
Throughout this section, there are strange scenes: Chen Qing often stares at the river in a daze, and she often asks her son whether he hears someone calling her name. What does she wait for in this state of delirium? On her way from the ferry to the hotel, she has to pass a signboard indicating the date of the beginning of construction of the Three Gorges Dam (which is also the deadline for migration for local residents like her). Next to this board, an advertisement posted on the wall reads: “The film In Expectation is to be screened soon.” Apparently, she is expecting or desiring something. What is it? A romantic engagement?
 
Thus comes the third section. The caption tells us that the third protagonist appearing now is the police officer Wu Gang, who has just planned the date of his wedding. In this last chapter, the major characters are all implicated and the riddle finally sorted out; yet this scenario comes in a rather surprising way, one that essentially exemplifies a phenomenology of fatalism, or a sense of doom, as well as its dialectical other: a desire that is expected to be fulfilled.
 
While Wu is busy preparing for his wedding, Lao Mo arrives to report a rape. When Wu expresses surprise that the one doing the reporting is not the victim herself, Lao Mo resorts to the Maoist discourse of “serving the people”; yet his high-sounding words merely conceal his selfish motivation. He believes that someone raped Chen Qing because he saw her crying after a man rushed out of her room. But in response to Wu’s interrogation, Chen Qing denies the accusation. When one day Lao Mo chances upon the man, he reports it to Wu Gang, and the suspect Mai Qiang is detained. Mai acknowledges that he sleeps with Chen, yet he has met her through Ma Bing, and he gives his entire monthly earnings to Chen, even though the normal fee for her sex work is only one-eighth that amount. His explanation is ambiguous and not to the point: he just focuses on the monthly wage. When Ma Bing is brought in to corroborate the story, he is astonished by Mai’s confession, for he had merely played a joke on Mai by insinuating that the woman on the street was a hooker. He did not believe that Mai could have sex with her on account of Mai’s naivety. These different perspectives are somewhat like a Rashomonian myth in that each person tells the story differently and we are left to decide what the actual truth is.
 
Yet what is more intriguing is the characters’ sense of fatality. Mai Qiang says that he probably has met Chen Qing sometime somewhere, and Lao Mo also has a similar feeling about Mai Qiang. Did they ever meet? What kind of destiny do they sense? In the second section, Chen Qing keeps asking her son whether someone is calling her, and in the first chapter, Mai Qiang tells Ma Bing after he is awakened by the latter that he was dreaming of someone. These strange episodes converge to illuminate each other when we get to the end of the movie, and we know that the couple is indeed expecting to see each other. When Mai Qiang learns that because of his affair with Chen Qing, Chen’s proposed marriage is wrecked and she has to continue her ignoble life, he can no longer restrain himself and swims across the river to look upon her. Facing the man long expected, Chen cannot help herself and cries out to relieve her bittersweet feelings.

On the Phenomenology of Fatalism and Desire as Expectation

At first sight, the movie seems to present itself as critical realism, exposing the hardships of the working class and eulogizing their authentic love; these subjects emerged in modern China during the 1930s and 1940s, when progressive, left-wing cinema that exemplified the difficult lives and innate goodness of the underclass became the mainstream. To some extent, this film indeed shows the lamentable lives of an underprivileged group of workers who implicitly had been members of a dignified, collective-oriented class yet now degenerated into atomized employees selling their labor and even bodies in a dull and purposeless manner. For instance, because Chen Qing, once (and still) member of the SOE, desperately needs to survive in a market economy for herself as well as for her son, she not only has to exchange sex for the leader’s favor, but also engages in prostitution in secret. Although she has decided to quit the “job” and get remarried, once her affair with Mai Qiang is exposed, she suffers public humiliation. In this way, their indignity is displayed, while their sense of dignity is also stressed (for instance, in one scene Chen Qing loses her temper with a client who insinuates that she prostitute herself and pokes fun at her). Meanwhile, since this film exposes the hypocritical bureaucrat (Lao Mo) and shows the power of the police (Wu Gang), elements reminiscent of similar plots in the tradition of critical realism, we are more prone to include it in that category. Here these elements appear for the first time on the screen of contemporary China—since the reform era—which led to the film’s popular acclaim.
 
Yet to understand the film, we have to look into its idiosyncratic mode of representation. The representation of the thematic subject here is inseparable from the form. First, we can barely detect any salient critique of the pro-capitalist transformation from the superficial plotline, since the relevant information is only subtly conveyed. This is because all the related events and episodes are presented as normal. The film is interested in “familiarization” rather than in the reverse.[8] In addition, the overarching plotline, i.e., the love between the downtrodden couple, is rendered to be a Rashomonian, unexplainable “accident.” Meanwhile, numerous strange episodes still wait for explication. In one such incident, when Chen is working at the counter, a man wearing a traditional Taoist robe and chignon comes into the diegetic space. He stops before the gate of the hotel, and the shot-reverse-shot shows the two making eye contact, after which Chen Qing shyly lowers her head. This shot sequence probably shows Chen Qing’s hallucination in her state of delirium, because she is forced to sell her body, which makes her feel guilty, so she falls into a trance when she sees a Taoist pass the hotel. Her initial relation with Mai Qiang is possibly also due to this illicit transaction. In this light, the intimate emotions brought about by the prostitution are what the film aims to show: Mai Qiang is attracted by this plump woman and feels that they are linked by certain ties of fate (with its Buddhist connotation). Out of sympathy for her desolate situation, he leaves his one-month wage, which gives Chen a good impression of him; she waits for him day and night after that.
 
Although this explanation of the affections between them is reasonable, it is a scandal for “civilized” society, and we can understand the ambivalence of the depiction. The movie show genuine feeling between the couple, but we are not sure whether it is love or desire. When Chen’s little son is looking at his mother’s corpulent body through the shower curtain, it is apparent that even this child has a knowledge of his mother’s secret and disgrace: when Chen and Lao Mo stay in the same room, he angrily throws stones at the door. When Chen Qing expresses her feelings of love and hate towards Mai Qiang when they finally reunite, he silently slips past them in a sensible manner. Desire as the omnipresent yet silent force not only shows itself in the ties between Lao Mo and Chen Qing, but also particularly in the “rape case.” In the existential situation of the film—in the newly depoliticized society—no one is exempt from this condition: neither the unit leader nor the staff, neither adults nor children.
 
To understand why desire plays such a significant role here, let us return to the “Great Event” that serves both as the background and the subtext of the film, like a shadow enveloping these characters. This event does not merely include the Three Gorges Dam project, nor does it simply imply that Wushan County, where they reside, is destined to be flooded when the project is complete. The derelict buildings along the river show signs of an impending end; the fortunes of the underclass are also doomed, including those of Mai Qiang, Chen Qing, and even Lao Mo (the SOE in which they work will soon become history because of its miserable financial situation), like so many working people in China at the time when the neoliberal agenda of wholesale privatization was arriving on the scene.
 
It is in this doomed (but also uncannily exciting) setting that the film traces three disparate but intersecting lives. Under a seemingly fin-de-siècle atmosphere, men’s desire looms large. All three central characters are bothered by egocentric considerations; the emphasis is clearly on their sexual desires and frustrations as well as on their misplaced hopes. This picture needs to be correlated with the broader social context if we are to fully understand its realist connotation as well as its allegorical import. Apart from Wu Gang, all the protagonists are workers. The working class they represent has lost its political consciousness of safeguarding its collective interests under the depoliticized conditions since the late 1980s, and has been subject to atomization. It reluctantly accepts the coercive arrangement offered by the authoritative regime and suffers the dire consequence of its neoliberal policies. The workers do not even know how the homogenous time elapses, whereas qualitative changes have taken place in reality. In the movie, this is represented with the imperceptible flow and sudden re-emergence of time in a way that is reminiscent of the art film. Recurring jump cuts show the ebb and flow of time, which is sometimes the result of hallucination. One scene goes like this: when Mai Qiang, Ma Bing, and Lili sit listlessly around the table idling away time, the first shot shows there is nothing on the table, yet in the next shot three eggs are on it, while Lili and Mai Bin have changed their seats. In another scene, the first shot presents Chen Qing looking out from her counter in a daze, while four men behind her are playing cards in the lobby; the next shot reveals that when presence of mind suddenly comes back to her, the four men have been in a deep sleep on the sofa, lying in all directions. The lapse of time is presented mythically, signifying the unreliability of time as a physically entity, or the psychological nature of time for humanity (in particular for the characters). In a phenomenological sense, these episodes expose the chronotropic effect of this transformative era.
 
This effect is usually taken to be the “unseen but inexorable spectacular and destructive developmental process”; according to Kaldis, it is “against this backdrop” that “the director singles out and explores the analogously less tangible psychosexual conflicts engendered by such living conditions” (67). In particular, he argues, the movie shows
 

the troubled psyches of individuals who are being traumatized by this obliteration of their social and natural habitats. Under such conditions, they experience detachment, disorientation, anomie, and dysphoria, and are alienated from their surroundings, from other people, and from their own experiences. For the protagonists Mai Qiang and Chen Qing, this takes the form of a confusion of real and imagined sexual relations with other people. (66)

Indeed, it is under this surface of a quiet yet stifling living situation that (sexual) desires surge forward violently. The film purposely demonstrates that for the underclass living in this hopeless environment, physical desire or natural instinct is the primary concern.
 
This logic of desire is pushed to its utmost, verging on the uncomfortable, as illustrated by three deliberately orchestrated episodes, all of which are related to killing fish. The first two focus on Mai and Chen and show them in graphic detail absentmindedly doing the bloody job. The scenes indicate that in this doomed setting, the characters care (indifferently) for nothing but the existential anxiety of survival and sex. In a third episode, police officer Wu Gang is occupied with the same job. Unlike the other two characters, however, he does not do it on screen. We only see him observing fish in a cask that has been presented by his work unit.
 
As a civil servant, Wu Gang still enjoys the privilege of receiving articles of daily use and various other welfare items now and then distributed by the work unit, a practice popular in the socialist period that continues in official institutions to this day. As a police officer, Wu Gang’s authority is partially granted by his profession, yet also comes from his manner of serving the people. Seemingly arrogant at times, and preoccupied by the preparations for his upcoming marriage, he nevertheless largely fulfills his duty by doing his best to investigate the “rape case.” In the post-socialist era, the hold of the socialist work ethic is loosened (as we see in Lao Mo’s behavior), yet the residual spirit of the notion of serving the people is still visible at times. In another scene, when Mai Qiang is released, Wu Gang helps him with a haircut, which shows his sympathy and his sense of friendship for the underprivileged.
 
But all of these actions pertaining to the idea of socialist ethics and morality are exemplified in an unconscious way, whereas the other dimension of the post-socialist era is shown more explicitly. This exposure includes Wu Gang’s implicit acceptance of a bribe—Ma Bing acquires for him a cheaper washing machine when Ma Bing is detained for interrogation—as well as the various violations (if not betrayals) of (socialist) class sympathy: Ma Bing and Mai Qiang have held onto this sympathy (depicted as brotherhood, and conveyed unconsciously through their cordial exchanges and tender concern for each other, especially Ma Bing’s loving care for Mai Qiang in the early stage of his visit). Now, in this atomized society, they have to betray each other for personal interests, as demonstrated in their confrontation before the police officer (though most of the time they remain embarrassingly silent when being interrogated). Thus we know that under the threat of the force of the Great Event, people cannot keep their class sympathies.
 
Facing imminent transformation beyond their control, with a feeling of helpless resignation these subaltern figures try to eke out an existence.  Their self-consolation points to the other side of the consequence of change on the psyches of the subaltern, and of the Chinese people in general at the time: feeling doomed, they also harbor an indistinct expectation that becomes a subconscious, for the state’s propaganda claims that their life would be much better after the emigration and after the transformative era concludes – that is, after the market economy had been fully established and market principles are wholeheartedly followed by the people.[9] Therefore, the movie that is supposed to be screened in the local county is named In Expectation and demands the intended audience’s expectation. When Mai Qiang and Lili come to the riverside that night, upon seeing a steamboat moving forward, Lili opens her arms excitedly and cries out, “Where are you going? Where are you going?” and then impetuously strips down to her underwear and takes a dip in the river. Though she does not know whither the boat goes, she expects or hallucinates that it could take her to explore the unknown world; and she dares to have a try.
 
To be sure, the characters also have some clear expectations: Chen Qing longs for her remarriage, Lao Mo for Chen Qing, and Wu Gang for his wedding. Before the film ends and Mai and Chen meet together, two shots show them silently staring at the moving river. Are they waiting for each other, or musing on their future? Whatever the expectation, it is closely related to their physical desire. When Lili changes the channels of the TV in Mai Qiang’s apartment, the TV shows distorted pictures and noises. Ma Bing then teases Lili by asking, “Are you looking for the TV programs from the States?” The States have symbolized a free and rich life in China ever since the 1980s (when the state’s reform agenda fully embraced modernization as its objective).
 
To show this theme of “fulfillment of desire to be expected,” the movie dialectically stresses the repression of it. Mai Qiang is a quiet old bachelor, appearing almost ascetic, yet he harbors a strong and ulterior desire for Chen Qing; Lao Mo represses his urge in public since he is a unit leader, yet he requests numerous liaisons with Chen after office hours; Chen Qing often falls into a delirious state on account of her longing for Mai Qiang; Wu Gang cannot wait any longer for his upcoming marriage. All of these desires are subtly delineated to show that they constitute the characters’ existential condition per se. When Mai Qiang the fully depoliticized worker swims across the river to meet Chen Qing, which symbolizes his breaking away from conventional custom or socially constrained morality (not to mention any concept of socialist ethics), the legitimacy of “natural desire” is reinstated.
 
In contrast to characters who seem to suppress their desire, only the vulgar Ma Bing and Lili are represented as paragons of sexual liberation on account of their implicit embrace of a commodified nature. Yet we cannot afford to neglect the fact that Ma Bing is a lumpenproletariat figure; he first appears in the film leaving an outdoor restroom, and has fewer moral misgivings, whereas Lili has to fight for her “service fee” by fair means or foul. Even the passion between Mai Qiang and Chen Qing is apparently paid for. The desire that the film extols and legitimizes has a specific feature: it is inscribed with the imprint of a market economy, and is thus commodified. Chen Qing and Lili sell their bodies, and Lao Mo and Mai Qiang pay to manipulate women, though these actions might be glossed over with the rhetoric of a liberated lifestyle or of intimate affections among the underprivileged. In fact, the urge to make money or the desire to follow the principle of market economy appears in the beginning when the film introduces Mai Qiang and Ma Bing: Ma Bing refuses to use the landscapes offered by Mai Qiang as toilet paper, but intends to sell them back in Beijing.[10]
 
The commodity logic of the market can be seen in the destiny of women, who it is suggested are scarified and despised in a capitalist-oriented economy. In this movie that implicitly expresses a yearning for the coming market society, we find examples of women’s fortunes in a market society, fortunes that are shown to be symptomatic of misogyny. The two heroines Chen Qing and Lili are both materialistic. They are “inexplicably associated with one another, in twin scenes showing each of them holding a piece of currency up to the light. Lili is apparently bored or hinting that she can be bought, while Chen Qing is checking for counterfeit money received from hotel customers” (Kaldis 68). Kaldis aptly observes that for the prostitute Lili in particular,
 

viewers are not given much insight into Lili’s personality, desire, and motives, and must surmise the precise (sexual) relationship between Lili and the men with whom she associates. … Lili appears to be on autopilot — she performs the role of a sexpot with aplomb, but it is as if there is little more to her identity, nothing behind her performance, just the shell of an artificial character. She expresses few emotions aside from a childlike impulsiveness, frequent boredom, and contrived sensuality, all performed for the gaze of Mai Qiang and Ma Bing. (68)

In the patriarchal society of the post-socialist era, women suffer the most. The exchange principle of the market takes youthful women as sex commodities, and treats them badly: Ma Bing “pushes Lili about, slaps her head while talking to Mai Qiang, drags her into the bedroom for sex, and even tries to force Mai to have sex with her” (Kaldis 68). The women do not own their own subjectivity. Even the less materialistic Chen Qing (we have to note that she sells her body to Lao Mo and Mai Qiang for a mere sustenance fee) “seems to have no capacity for pleasure, sexual or otherwise, and appears to be oblivious to her own apathy” (68).[11] The men, including Mai Qiang himself, do not take women seriously. When being interrogated, Mai Qiang mentions casually that he went to the hotel just for a “private affair” with a woman, and calmly admits: “I slept with her and then left all my money on the table.”
 
So the “Great Event” of the spreading market economy (appearing through the camera obscura as the impending doom of destruction) not only works in the background, casting a shadow over the fate of the characters, but also serves as the subtext that dialectically undergirds the men’s concealed desires, which are furthermore displaced to be women’s desires (such as Lili’s and Chen Qing’s). In this way, this movie ingeniously transforms its male-chauvinist, misogynic inner core to the appearance of taking care of the destiny of the oppressed women.

Realism, Naturalism, or (Post)Modernism?

Let us return to the movie’s idiosyncratic form or peculiar way of delivering its message. Jameson explores the idiosyncratic concept of the “play of figuration” in his discussion of postmodern art (Postmodernism 411). As “an essentially allegorical concept,” such play assumes that some “new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any individual subject or consciousness”; to put it another way, “those fundamental realities are somehow ultimately unrepresentable or … are something like an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception” (Postmodernism 411). Still, Jameson reminds us that “this absent cause can find figures through which to express itself in distorted and symbolic ways” (Postmodernism 411). We can see such figures in the movie.
 
The director Zhang Ming says that it is his belief that a good movie combines the real and reverie (Li Dongran 139). There are several shots that follow this directive: in a scene when Mai Qiang is talking to Ma Bing about “the woman on the other side of the bank,” the next shot shows him already swimming across the river, which is his psychological movement soon to be realized, for the following shot returns to the original scene of discussion. It is a surrealist technique. The film also uses symbolism to deliver indirect messages. For instance, in a long shot, a bald-headed man with a wig goes to get a haircut. Yet no matter what the barber does to his hair, he is not satisfied; finally he angrily takes off his wig and leaves. Just like Lao Mo, he tries to cover up his appearance, yet his features are inexorably revealed. In another scene, when Lili sits with Mai and Ma around the table, she sees a tuft of grass growing tenaciously in the darkness, which may refer to the three characters’ tenacious perseverance in life. Still on another occasion, when Mai Qiang goes to the restroom while Lili waits for him in bed, we see a broken chair there, which reflects Ma’s nervousness.
 
Besides the ubiquitous symbolism, other mysterious phenomena appear here and there. When Lao Mo reports the alleged rape to Wu Gang, he emphasizes that he probably has met the rapist before, which implies that he and Mai Qiang indeed have met at some point in the past. Yet the narrative does not give us any information about this possible encounter; it also leaves out any narration that would explain the passion between Mai and Chen. Without this narration, for the audience there is only a mysterious telepathy between them. There are also other scenes not directly related to the narrative; for instance, a policeman is drinking cola in the police station when Wu Gang interrogates Ma Bing (a sign for his desire or thirstiness?).
 
These unusually arranged shot sequences indicate that the movie does not aim for a conventional realism. To understand these phenomena, we need to know that a sort of uncanny feeling was shared by not a few people, including film directors, around the time this movie was made. Jia Zhangke, probably the most well-known member of the Sixth Generation, once said:
 
I have the impression that a surrealist atmosphere prevails in China today, because the entire society faces an enormous pressure to speed up. As a result, many strange and unimaginable events have occurred in reality. As they say, “reality is more exceptional than fiction.” The surrealistic elements sound unbelievable to most of us, but they are part of reality…. Under this enormous pressure, people are in a state of unknown agitation and unknown excitement. This state results in an irrational attitude. Sadly, because many people do not believe they have any future, they splurge on excessive enjoyment, as if life might end tomorrow. (Qtd. in Lu Tonglin 126)
 
Film critics also have long known that to “capture a phenomenological sense of reality, a filmmaker must tirelessly struggle against cinematic illusion by means of formal innovations” (Lu Tonglin 127). It is the social subtext that explains the film’s tactics.
 
One problem that concerns this film, in my view, is that it takes an outsider’s point of view to observe and gaze on the lives of the underprivileged subaltern, and this gaze is furthermore premised upon its own understanding of what humanity is and should be; therefore many times what the characters think or feel is not known or explicated.[12] This reminds me of Jameson’s elaboration of his discomfort with a certain sort of “humanism”:
 

It seems to me the “respect for the freedom of the other” is very much one of these humanist slogans that I would prefer to avoid. And I would also rather [have] … a political act than an ethical act, because for me the latter is also a humanistic category, and after all one may be respecting the freedom of the people talking in the film, but one also wishes very much to use that politically against some other people’s freedom. (Jameson and Chanan 137)

In our case, while “the freedom to act” of Mai Qiang, Ma bin, Chen Qing, and Lili is ostensibly allowed to be presented, their right to speak out for themselves, within the fictional space, is to a great extent usurped and represented by an omnipresent, omnipotent, and voyeuristic camera’s eye.
 
While the film imitates the minimalism of western art films to reflect the social, it always does it in an inorganic way. There is never a pan shot of the environment, so we cannot figure out the contours of Wushan County, and we do not even know much about the physical features of the lighthouse and the hotel. When Lao Mo is chasing Wu Gang, the streets he runs through are shot at a narrow angle, making the audience unable to figure out their relations with the surrounding buildings. This camerawork not only gives the audience a merely vague feeling for the physicality of differing locations, but also causes any cognizance of the society in question to be clouded by the phantasmagoric illusion caused by intense desire, a result also of self-enclosure.[13] Discussing Lacan’s theory, Jameson has aptly noted that “the whole thrust of Lacanianism in the early seminars is directed against the Imaginary, and the illusions of the Imaginary, which are unity, and the ego.” In this regard, “fiction film is the realm of the Imaginary, it is the construction of the Imaginary, the ego of the viewer, and so on; all the mesmerisations and the illusions of the Imaginary are present in fiction film” (Jameson and Chanan 140). In this movie, “the ego of the viewer” is suggested by the camera’s eye, which offers various episodic scenes of “all the mesmerisations and the illusions of the Imaginary.” However, in the film we never see “the Symbolic order,” which would have “played the role of destroying the illusions of the Imaginary” and of “lift[ing] the person who’s locked into the illusions of the Imaginary, break[ing] the subject out of that into some other order which is not a personal order” (Jameson and Chanan 140). This “big Other somewhere” is completely out of the picture. With its theme of alienation, loneliness, and frustration in a rapidly industrializing society, the film seems tied to the modernist era, yet fragmented and imbued with the symptoms of historical amnesia, it suggests the postmodernist episteme as elucidated by Jameson.[14]
 
But postmodern culture is a product of post-industrialized capitalist society, and, as widely acknowledged, registers this condition stylistically. Whether we take distance and self-consciousness as an implicit political critique arising from a certain historical awareness (Hutcheon 1-2; 101-106) or merely as “blank parody” without any political bite (Jameson, Postmodernism 17), we rarely see these features in the movie. Instead, the film merely conveys a perplexed feeling without either irony or parody.
 
All these inappropriate labels point to the unusual characteristics of this “art film.” The particularity of the form comes from the uniqueness of the content, which shows a moment of historical conjuncture in the Chinese world – the very start of a market-oriented society under the sway of its ethical economy of commodity enchantment with its ulterior lure in the name of desire. It is this post-socialist, de-politicized Chinese society that overdetermines the unique genre of this movie as aesthetically idiosyncratic (and as hybridized as its postmodern counterpart). Ultimately, behind the facade of a “postmodern” film with the cloak of modernism, and harboring the essence of a realistic movie established by the techniques of symbolism, naturalism and surrealism, there exists an idiosyncratic “post-socialist” movie.
 
In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson points out that some contemporary films capture nascent or new aspects of (and formations in) the stages of capitalism by representing an “epistemological problem” and constituting an “ultimate challenge to cognitive mapping” (88). In particular, he identifies conspiracy films in this regard. In this movie we witness the nascent stage of the pro-capitalist market economy in post-revolutionary China, which is indicated not only by the movie’s eerie score, but also by the bizarre atmosphere circumscribed by a strong and omnipresent desire, a result of the desiring machine offered by the exchange principle of the commodity economy, which reduces men and women to fetishized objects of consumption. Like a conspiracy film, this movie devotes approximately half of the diegetic space to the investigation of the alleged rape. The director says that the film “intensively depicts aimless desires at a time that they suddenly emerged unexpectedly. The long-term taboos are gradually fading away. People feel that they can do something, but they do not know what they should do. This is the truest reality of China at that time” (qtd. in Li Dongran 139). To show the desire for expected emancipation, from a fatalistic point of view and an illusionary perspective, the film delivers its subaltern love story. Yet this romance is more of a narrative projected by middle-class urbanites’ own desires and fantasies. Those in expectation are rarely underprivileged men and women (this does not mean that they are exempt from visionary hope, but, as Marx informed us, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” [236]). It is the social elite, such as the director and the screenwriter Zhu Wen (a famed avant-garde writer distinguished for his fictional writings depicting the sexual desires and sexual practices of urbanites), who can afford to expect the future. Under their gazes, the vulgarity of the underclasses is observed with a seemingly sympathetic view and represented as spectacle. From their perspective, all the interpersonal relations among the characters are inflicted with this diehard principle of commodity exchange or market transaction which nevertheless disguises or metamorphoses itself as desire. Even the genuine affections between Mai and Chen are insinuated to be brought about by Mai’s “service fee” much higher than normal price.[15] Yet in reality, the embarrassing poverty and listlessness of that class goes far beyond the elite’s concept of the real.
 
Under the shadow of the “Great Event” as the ontological setting, everything has changed. By highlighting desire as the omnipresent driving force for the laboring class, the movie unconsciously falls into the pitfall of pansexualism, which, however, is essentially the sensory machine offered by the capitalist commodity economy. Or, what the producers of the movie do not realize is that the essential nature of the desire is the exchange value of the commodity. Since this desire becomes a consumable commodity, it seems everyone can dream of it – even passionate feelings and intimate physical exchanges can be earned or at least expected through a sort of commodity exchange. This fantasy left many people at the time to yearn for the coming of the new era. Only after the latter fully blossomed in the late 1990s did people realize its true nature; whereas in the movie, none of the characters is “able to make sense of his/her environment or communicate with others in a satisfactory manner” (Kaldis 62).

Coda

The enchantment of commodified desire grew with ferocious speed with the blossoming of the market system in China in the late 1990s; we witness a variation on the theme of desire to be consumed and consummated thereafter. In the director’s second film, Miyu Shiqi xiaoshi 秘语十七小时 (“Weekend Plot”), produced five years after Rain Clouds, we find a group of young men and women unabashedly chasing their desires, for which they suspect each other because of a piece of paper inscribed with the short line “Love you unto death.” The omnipotent force of desire has seriously eroded feeling of brotherhood and caused the once intimate community to disintegrate. Here the seduction of commodified desire assumes a more significant role, to the extent of becoming intensively alluring, as shown in numerous scenes that depict the female body as sexually seductive. But the devastating effects of the market are more alarmingly presented in the director’s third feature, Jie Guo 结果 (which literally means “the result” but is translated into English awkwardly as “Before Born”). In this film, produced in 2006, ten years after In Expectation, we find that the destiny of Chinese women has fallen into a much more miserable state with the maturation of market society. Although the title of the movie also suggests expectation (and results or consequences), and it too explores such themes as lost time, futurity, and futility, the content is vastly different. It is still enveloped in a surreal atmosphere of mystery, which invites comparisons to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 classic L’Avventura. It portrays the pursuits of a private detective, who is hired to gather evidence of an affair for his employer. When in search of his target Li, he discovers that two young women are also looking for the man. The two women have both been made pregnant by this wealthy businessman who never shows up; yet not unexpectedly, our detective falls hopelessly in love with one of them. Playing with the motif of desire, the epochal truth-content of the film is that in contemporary Chinese society, beautiful women have become playthings for patriarchal power when omnipresent yet invisible Capital becomes the (name of the) Father—who, with his mysterious power, seduces these women to let themselves willingly become his playthings or his prey. In this way, the director’s exploration of the post-socialist sensory machine in the pro-capitalist neoliberal era develops further. Expectedly, however, he never consciously reveals the devastating effects of the great Power, namely Capital in the embodiment of commodified desire and incarnated in the imperceptible entrepreneur.
 
Yet how to represent faithfully or authentically the existential situation of the underprivileged strata is a controversial problematic, and we see different methods for handling the issue. Ten years after Rain Clouds over Wushan was made, another film treating almost exactly the same subject came out. Still Life (Sanxia haoren三峡好人), made by Sixth Generation auteur Jia Zhangke (1970- ), is also set in the town of Wushan, and similarly follows an outside man who comes to visit the town; it again focuses on the lives of lonely people living there during the destruction of local buildings and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam; finally, it likewise tells a tale of urban alienation. Yet the perspective and narrative strategy it adopts are quite different, exemplifying a differing way of characterizing the subaltern. This difference has less to do with the time of production than with the directors’ ideas about class and the genre of the art film. Still Life appears more “realistic”: with its salient critique of social illness and extolment of the innate goodness of the subaltern class, the movie comes close to the tradition of revolutionary realism and even socialist realism in modern China, demonstrating a resuscitation of the spirit of critical realism in the new stage of neoliberal reform. However, its belief in a non-political, ahistorical, and universal human nature to a certain extent still constrains its exploration of social contradiction.[16]

Introduction

Heriberto Yépez is a Mexican writer who practices many genres. He is a poet, a novelist, an essayist and a translator who maintains a highly visible profile in Mexican letters. For many years, he has published regularly in the country’s most important newspapers and cultural supplements, and he also cultivates an online presence, maintaining a blog where he reposts some of his work and engages with literary and cultural polemics in both Mexico and the United States.
 
Yépez is from Tijuana, and unlike many Mexican writers from northern states who crave a national audience, he has chosen not to move to Mexico City, the highly centralized cultural nucleus of the country. The experience of living in the U.S./Mexico borderlands informs his writing on many levels, and he continually experiments with the delicate balancing act of speaking for a local culture while addressing a broad and often distant public. Some of Yépez’s best-known works deal specifically with Tijuana and how the city oscillates between two contradictory imaginaries: it is either condemned as the junkyard of postmodernity, or singled out as a promising laboratory for cultural hybridity. In his novel A.B.U.R.T.O. (2005), for example, he parts from the figure of Mario Aburto, the presumed killer of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was shot in Tijuana in 1994, to recreate the atmosphere of the city during one of its darkest periods. Tijuanologías (2006), a combination of essay and chronicle, is not exactly a book about Tijuana, but rather about how the border city is imagined and mythified in both Mexico and the Unites States. In this work, Yépez constructs Tijuana, and the region of northern Mexico, as a space that stands in opposition to a hegemonic center (the capital), paradoxically reaffirming the interdependence between both spaces in the national Mexican imaginary.
 
Although Yépez presents himself as a writer from the borderlands, located far from the cultural capital of Mexico City and outside the vast academic and literary networks of the United States, he is hardly a marginal figure. His online presence has effectively counterbalanced the limitations that often accompany publishing in small regional presses—the circulation and distribution of books in Mexico is notoriously deficient, and it is often difficult to find books published in Tijuana, for example, in the rest of the country. Yépez has also published in mainstream transnational presses such as Editorial Planeta, and in some of Mexico’s most established media outlets. In his weekly newspaper column, published in Laberinto, the literary supplement to the Mexico City daily Milenio until the summer of 2015, Yépez was relentlessly polemical, sometimes to the point of being self-defeating. His articles often launched heated discussions, staging—and reaffirming—his contentious relationship with both established Mexico City writers and academic culture on both sides of the border. More than constituting a rejection, Yépez’s provocations mark a will to engage with these different cultural spheres. As a self-styled border intellectual with a flair for performance—his new blog persona is “Border Destroyer”—Yépez places himself in a privileged position to intervene in conversations both north and south, assuming an ironic critical distance and a belligerent tone that can obscure how astutely he navigates both spheres.
 
The border—both in its immediate political reality and in its potential for conceptual thought—also informs Yépez’s essays in literary criticism and theory.  As a harsh, non-synchronic space, where polyphony is possible but at the cost of great inequality, the border enables the development of a critical double distance, one that serves as a starting point for cultural analysis. Thinking theoretically from the border also constitutes an exercise in forging—sometimes even forcing, if need be—a coincidence between the practical and the abstract, the objective being to transform a border space generally placed at the receiving end of theory into a source of theoretical thought in itself.
 
“Against Telephysics” is the first essay of Yépez’s short book Contra la tele-visión, published in 2008 by a small Mexico City press called Tumbona Ediciones. It is included in their “Versus” series, an original and often playfully polemic collection of texts where writers and cultural critics develop arguments “against” certain concepts, such as originality (Jonathan Lethem), having children (Lina Meruane), active life (Rafael Lemus), love (Laura Kipnis), or non-smokers (Richard Klein). The format of the books juxtaposes philosophy and popular culture. They are small and slim pocket-sized volumes, with cover art that mimics boxing posters—glove included—and that presents each author as one of the adversaries in a match. Yépez’s essay fits well in the series, in part because of his contentious public presence, of course, but also because of his writing style, which draws from both the essayistic tradition of Octavio Paz, seeped in philosophy and psychoanalysis, and the cultural criticism of Carlos Monsiváis, of a conversational and informal nature, more attuned with Mexican popular culture.
 
This essay, like many of Yépez’s columns, is composed of short sentences, maxims and aphorisms. In a fragmented style that reads a bit like a Twitter feed, he moves between concepts and registers, choosing to illustrate, rather than argue for, his conceptualization of tele-physics. Yépez contends that we live in a period where tele-physics (the culture of the image) has replaced meta-physics (the cultivation of the spirit). The notions of distance, otherness, contradiction and radical difference have been replaced by an anthropocentric fantasy of integration and of simultaneity, one that neutralizes the pain of separation. We are in a “world transformed into interzone”, Yépez claims, where the status quo of “already dominant values” is idealized and proposed as an object of desire. Undoubtedly, Yépez’s critique of tele-physics is anchored in his reflections on the border. Although this essay does not engage with the specificity of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the blatant tension, inequality and non-synchronicity inherent to this space are erased in the celebration of cultural hybridity that tele-physics facilitates, and it is precisely the friction of borders, of radical alterity, that he revindicates here.

Against Telephysics

“Tele-vision” is vision that being has of itself when it does not lie with itself. It is when Being and imago have become distant from each other. It is vision from an assumed distance before itself. Tele-vision is consciousness that is formed when we suppose that our being is not with us. Strictly, tele-vision was formed in the dualist era.
 
In general, dualism had been thought by means of metaphysical notions. But metaphysics is able to disappear without dualism coming to an end. Dualism is still preserved without the necessity of its old ally.
 
Metaphysics is fantasy and, at the same time, the attempt at ending fantasy.  (Hence, metaphysics is contradiction returning as greatness. The sublime paradox.) Metaphysics claims in a centripetal way that perceived (“sensory”) reality is an illusion whose foundation is found beyond. But metaphysics—as suggested by its loss of prestige—since the seventeenth century (“from Descartes to Wittgenstein”) announced its replacement. Until the present—still shadowed by the metaphysical paradigm, including Science, its final stronghold, through the subatomic world and the general notion of “law”—there is not a concept that describes the later phase of dualist fantasy (of which “metaphysics” is only one stage). Allow me to introduce a notion to describe that sequence. It is the notion of telephysics.
 
“Tele-vision” does not only signify a device (the “idiot box”) or, even, a (spectacular, commodified or acidic) lifestyle.[1] What is called “tele-vision,” though we are not conscious of it, implies a displacement from metaphysics toward telephysics. This turn defines this epoch.
 
I am dating this epoch starting from the sixteenth century, when telephysics predominates in the “discovery” between the Oxident and America. Also, the transformation of Being into self-image, and images of the Other into realities which become institutions or practices, was accelerated, becoming explicit in the World Order. This order is the order of telephysics that cancels the (exclusive) separated worlds of the metaphysical era, in order to inaugurate an epoch in which the Other has been integrated.
 
If metaphysics is the general position from which one encounters “true” reality in another “world” (either the Topus Uranus or the quantum world) and, thus, the “macro” or “sensible” reality is an illusion or an aura, telephysics is the turn that consists in alleging (consciously or unconsciously) that authentic reality is found far away (tele), but inside of this world. Telephysics found the furthest beyond without having to leave this world.
 
Telephysics made this world an infinite postponement.
 
Telephysics not only abolished the other world. It also abolished this world to substitute itself for a series of interfaces in its search. It is the world transformed into interzone.
 
Metaphysics postulates that it is required to go beyond this world to find “reality,” “truth,” or “science;” telephysics, on the other hand, postulates that one must search all that is “beyond,” but inside of “this” world. Telephysics is the denial of radical otherness. It is the sphere of (unrealized) sameness. It is the co-unconscious project of de-realizing the world to supplant it with a single series of abstract desires, a purely phantasmal co-unconscious.
 
Telephysics is the fantasy of impossible integration.
 
The distant is no longer the metaphysical, but the physical itself. In the metaphysical perspective, the physical was the misleading immediate. In the telephysical, the metaphysical (a beyond of physis) has disappeared, but the physical strictly has also vanished. (It is a reflection that searches for someone outside of the mirror and does not find her.) In the telephysical, as much the physical as the metaphysical have evaporated. Telephysics is the domain of emptiness. Everything has become distance. And everything that one wants in that non-world is shortening distance. Desire has become synonymous with instantaneous signal.
 
The Sky has disappeared, but also the Earth. Or, better said, the Earth ran out in contrast to the Sky.
 
All to which there is a here has to find itself Far Away. It is the negation of the here and the far away. Telephysics is complete paradox. It is contradiction without the sublime. It is ridiculous antinomy.
 
You make an image and go towards it, as if you had not known that it is the image that was made by you yourself.
 
This is the image that fans of Paris Hilton or RBD have on their posters, the image that you will sign with the autograph of the superstar.[2] Seeing such an image would make you faint. It is also the image that the exploited has of herself, but long attributed to the exploiter, in whom she does not recognize herself.
 
The motivation of the telephysical is that the actual state-of-things (remaining unchanged) returns our beyond. For what this teleology achieves it is necessary to leave behind identifying which is the actual state-of-things and, once free of such consciousness, making it reappear no longer as prevailing reality, but as desirable objective.
 
“Be yourself”, “Yes!”, “Be Yourself!”,[3] are the perfect telephysical slogans: the once absurd psychology of a time that lives in recoil of its very self. Since, for not changing, the imaginary recoiled being, having recoiled in a brilliant move, looks forward toward its abandoned, imaginary reality and therefore achieves having a goal (¡tener una meta!), a goal that seems ahead.
 
Telephysical being recoils-from-itself and later aspires to itself.
 
Yet, why does the split occur that subsequently causes co-control? Why does a conflict occur in the interior of man (hombre)? The conflict appeared because a part of our being was invalidated by others (parents, family and society). And since that moment the conflict is as strong, the disagreement with oneself so intense, that we flee from that conflict taking a step back. In that step back, we take refuge in one of those poles; we situate it in a type of bullfighter’s cape, since one who observes oneself, as remote spectator, attributes the conflict to that other pole—Evil, Love, Other, etc. —, but seeing it from there (an inferior position, of oneself), one no longer recognizes it as an alienated part of oneself.
 
Paradoxically, looking so to that now “distant” pole—and with that which we have not identified ourselves as much as that from which we look—, it seems to us admirable, fearful, attractive, fascinating, repugnant, dangerous and, of course, we will watch ourselves moving toward it… reinstating of new the conflict that once again becomes unbearable, we will resolve such fallacious forms, newly giving a step back, and so on successively…
 
Telephysics is metaphysics without the Idea of radical “beyond.” Telephysics is metaphysics of a world that has lost its beyond.  Telephysics is the project of renunciation of the “other world.” Telephysics finds its other world in the fluctuation inside of this one. For the telephysical, the meta has disappeared and the tele has appeared: the beyond has given up its place to the distant-accessible.
 
This distance is able to be geography, epoch, class, gender, culture, etc. Telephysics traces its beyond in purity, it does not matter if this inscribes itself in the synchronic or the diachronic. Semiotics is the Seriousness of the telephysical! This epoch substituted the “Idea” (Metaphysics!) for the “Sign.”
 
In this context it should be clear what I further will interpret by “tele-vision.” Of course it means an electronic device and a series of channels wherein programs and news are transmitted. It means advertising, remote control, MTV, cable, Televisa, BBC, CNN, NBC, etcetera. “Tele-vision” signifies distraction, entertainment, spectacle, competitions, information, news, gossip, today.[4] (The tele-vision, feeling itself separated from everything, is obsessed with what happens “now.” Being absent from this reality, one desires to know it via remote control.) Tele-vision is the vision that those separated-from-Being (separados-del-Ser) have.
 
Tele-vision, after all, is the complement of lost perception. When one no longer correctly perceives the now, one requires an informational attachment. Tele-vision is part of the epistemological project. It provides consciousness. It is part of Science. The telescope and television set are part of the same telephysical impulse.
 
Tele-vision is the concrete (socio-material) bridge between the metaphysical era and the telephysical epoch. Tele-vision and movies show the transition between the metaphysical and the telephysical, a transition still unfinished.
 
Metaphysics permitted that we would go away ourselves from this world toward the imagination of a separate world; paradigm that was inherited from primitive thought, that which connected oneself with that mediated world of myth and rite. But telephysics already has another world distinct from the metaphysical world. If metaphysics is the identification with the soul or spirit, telephysics is the identification with the image. An image that, from that moment on, dreams itself as autonomous and then, at the next moment, becomes exasperated. Anxious of everything, eager for nothing. Telephysics is the retirement from all reality; the desire for which that exile could be possible.
 
The “television,” more than a technology, is how technology supplements (and modifies) the function of thinking. Thinking for the Greeks means situating oneself in the mental sphere in which entities find their otherworldly foundation. They dissolve its thinghood in an immaterial, single force (Parmenidean Being). Thinking signifies giving up conceiving the subject-object relation in order to find itself in the imagination of its arche, principle, law or un-limitation (apeiron); the thinkable in contraposition to the determined, sensible or finite. Tele-vision is the technique through which, in “ordinary life,” the Oxidental citizen renounces to travel to the region of the “Idea” in order to prefer that of the Image. If the bible (the religions of the Book) is metaphysics made mundane practice, tele-vision is reified telephysics. Tele-vision denies—like philosophical thinking—the (ontical) thing, but makes it an interval of progressive, linear time where metaphysics (thanks to uponoia) applied an interval of regressive, linear time; in this turn, we pass from the metaphysical search for (Reproductive) Essence to that for (Reachable) Image.
 
By tele-vision, therefore, I want to say “screen.” In that sense, it includes its precursor (movie theater) and its nieces (computer, internet, hyperreality, “war”). Telephysics is the beyond become (sociogeopolitical) distance: the distance, for instance, between First and Third World, citizen and ruler, life (vida) and VIP, becoming and fashion, now and Already.
 
Metaphysics believed in the I while telephysics predicts the Show.[5] If the I is the profound, substantial, abyssal stronghold, the Show is the I-as-another (Yo-Más-El-Otro) bearing witness to itself. It is the exchange of ritual (reinstallation of Mythical Time) for spectacle (teleportation toward Next World).[6] Telephysics is the epoch in which all technology has become special effect.
 
Metaphysics gives support to Essence; telephysics, to the Look.[7]
 
Telephysics is not entirely clear for us because we are an intermediate epoch between dying metaphysics and fetal telephysics. And, however, telephysics already shows itself as succession (sucesión) toward a metaphysics without Event (Suceso). Metaphysics was finding its reality in the invisible; telephysics, in the monitor.
 
The psycho-history of contemporary tele-vision explains how and for what we have passed from a metaphysical era to a telephysical epoch in that the historical yields its post to the pantopical.
 
What does the “historical” signify? The idea that there is a (Hegelian) Absolute that manifests itself through (Kantian) space-time. This idea shows, evidences, tests, waits, teleologizes, grand narrativizes, serves, and loves the historical from a progressive-linear mode.
 
So, the historical in the telephysical epoch is exchanged for the pantopical, but this substitution implies violence or transgressed paradigm without committed baton or essential passing of the torch: the pantopical is the historical without the necessity of the gradual, without the requisite of the one after the other. The only thing that differentiates the historical from the pantopical is that, in the pantopical, whatever was separated historically through time, “now” is “simultaneously” co-present in a “common” space in which everything co-exists in a synchronic co-here.
 
Tele-vision is one of the emblems of pantopia.
 
Tele-vision is the popular pantopia of which the “Market” is the abstract pantopia.
 
Why do we “view” TV? Because TV provides us with security—already announced by the metaphysics that freed us from religions—from the reality that “is elsewhere.” And, at the same time that it provides us with security from that “elsewhere,” it is merely “far away,” that is to say, not impossible; although distant, it is accessible and reachable. Tele-vision is metaphysics without tragedy. Metaphysics without the pain of separation. In that sense, tele-vision is the success of re-ligation.
 
Tele-vision flatters the (whimsical) certainty of that direction which we already possess and leads toward the Palace of the Other. An Other that we already know. An Other that is The Same. The Same Over There (Lo Mismo Allá).[8]
 
How is that translated into recognizable terms? The individual that works in alienated conditions from itself and others—not just a slave but simultaneously an owner: therefore, Neither-the-One-Nor-the-Other—loses herself while finding herself in consensus. Tele-vision certifies that difference is based on the identical. Tele-vision eliminates the contradiction that metaphysics aggravated. Tele-vision distracts from itself to occupy us with the otherness-that-is-not-it.
 
It is exactly by means of the tele-vision that the metaphysical yields its position to the telephysical in Oxidental daily life. And by Oxidental I do not want to say only the (Euro-American) Occidental, but all citizens of any culture in its late stage, in its globalized “hybridization.” The logic of the reality show displays the relation that the telephysical epoch maintains with the real; that is, the difference between the real and the reality is the difference that exists between the physical and the telephysical.[9] The same can be said of the notion of the “virtual.” They are already the first categories of the telephysical. The same philosophy, without entirely noticing this turn, has transformed itself since the Frankfurt School until Foucault, Baudrillard or Virilio, in a discussion about the telephysical. But the moment has arrived to understand it entirely. The metaphysical has died and from its abortion emerged the telephysical. Utopia has been supplanted by pantopia (pantopía). Pantopia is not the utopia that no longer has a future. Pantopia is the future that no longer has a present.
 
The telephysical is an anthropocentric fantasy; it is not occurring outside of the human being. In fact, the telephysical is the fantasy that man no longer becomes inside of the ecological process. How was the telephysical produced? A distance appeared between man and world that surrounded it: it hypertrophied “mind”: “thought” turned back to metastasis. The pain of the real was cured with the absolute invasion of reality, to which ideas and images juxtapose. When the juxtaposition covers the complete terrain of the exisiting we are in the total regime of the telephysical. It is the propagation of the “mental” that inaugurates this exclusively phantasmatic reign.
 
The telephysical sparkled when the world of things appeared. A “thing” is an entity whose process of becoming has become invisible. Therefore, it is charged with a (conscious or unconscious) fantasized autonomy in such a way that, psychologically, its actual reality (the thing that it is) and its process of becoming do not seem to be together. The thing is the entity separated from its process. Denied processes become telephysics.
 
The human being, we say, understood as a body that begins at the moment it makes itself visible in abstraction from its uterine, familiar, cultural, or geneaological process, is a thing. The modern notion of individual is not more than the objectfication of the indivisibility of the individual with other bodies—that long process. The individual as thing, namely, is conceived as a body whose being begins with delivery and whose mind will be a product of itself (or, in the best of cases, of its “environment”). The “thing” now abstracted from process, the telephysical temptation begins that, lacking any procedural evolution, will search for atomic metamorphosis, free eidolas!, giving consistency to its floatation in the ether of its neomemory.
 
In the same fashion, when meat is packaged between plastics, placed in a supermarket, deboned, including altered in its consistency, form, or original flavor: then, it has been objectified. In a world in which we are surrounded by things, of which we are not familiar of their process backwards and forwards within linear time, the telephysical gradually emerges: first as an ontological orphanhood (solitude), prideful separation (through hidden fear: rationalism of dominance) and unconscious feeling of the unreality of everything (idealism, irony); after, as an indifference toward the entire environment (nihilism), becoming a kind of container (pantopia) subject to constant reordering of parts (remix) and, finally, as a complete de-realization where things become images. It is this epoch in which we actually live, after a provisional transition through industry and the world-of-things. When things have reach their maximum thinghood, paradoxically, they fade mutating into images. (The telephysical is not the final phase. The images will become signals, orders; the telephysical could be accompanied, catalyzed, or exceeded by a cyberontological epoch, in which the real will be synonymous with its absolute self-control, where the difference between process, thing, image and order will be null.)
 
The telephysical opens a distance in which the closest becomes the furthest and the furthest is perceived as immediate. Both distances are obviously grand illusions. Being, then, no longer perceives that which is closest—its own body, its emotions, its domestic environment, its polis—and the distant believes itself to be a neighbor. The desire to be a star of the spectacle, the “world” of news, the images!—, inverting all reality, establishing neurotic emptiness.
 
Tele-vision, in reality, still is a precarious form of telephysics.
 
In its character as external device to the human body, in its role as receptacle or macrotechnology, it lets us see that even telephysics has not been perpetrated. (Telephysics is a project that is able to be disjointed.) Whatever we do is evidence that we already see the ordinary world through a screen. An Eleatic gap is already opened between our perception and the perceived. That same Eleatic gap is already opened between us and ourselves. The Tortoise of my life will never reach the Achilles of my escape.
 
A screen appeared between us and reality, a distance that, however, is made to pass through anti-distance. A medium that is made to pass through the mediated. An interzone that assumes the form of the immediate. Psychologically, TV is a mass immediate; more than mass media it is a technology that covers up its mediation by simulating itself immediately and massively. The television set is the technology that, by being globalized and homemade, accelerated the transition from metaphysics toward telephysics, taking us away from our reality—and continuing well the alienated project of dualism—in order to situate ourselves illusorily in a distant reality, inaugurating in this way a new beyond (neo ultrella). By means of tele-vision, telephysics invented a new “unreachable” that, no longer pertaining to the metaphysical unreachable (the noumenon), but forming part of the generalized telephysical promise (every world is constituted as this word), is phenomenon, is visible, is an unreachable accessible! Accessible through complementary fast food, gossip, the paparazzo’s eye, the ladder of fame, instant competition, the camera of reality.[10] Velocity governed the telephysical world and, by the same velocity, this stage could quickly vanish. Its function could be merely to destroy metaphysics and prepare another era, for that which the telephysical epoch would be a rapid mediation—seven or nine centuries. The epoch itself could be victim of its express character.
 
To the metaphysical empire corresponded a life based in another life; to the telephysical epoch, telelife (televida): to exist as if you were an image in a world in which the rest of the images were authentic. Telelife desires to preserve distance—by not maintaining this distance it throws itself into the uncertain at first and by any means desires to escape the televital—; and to preserve distance, the televital individual must move away as much as possible from itself becoming a self-image—constructed by the “fragmented I” (“y/o”),[11] the psycho-historical co-unconscious and both super egos (matriarchal and patriarchal). With that, the world is transformed into images based on realities that can buy, change, vote, disqualify, exchange at will, within translogical zapping, reload, code-switching, swinger, anything goes, 2×1, click!, remix, chaz chaz.[12] Telelife is the fading of the perception of processes into a destitute filth.
 
Contemporary tele-vision—that is, one that works underneath the understanding of a world (this world) and share one time: the tele-vision that constitutes itself as Receptacle Space—is the leading technology though which latent logic is psycho-historically propagated; the post-metaphysical (pro-telephysical) is modernized; it reiterates the idea that reality is unreal, that there is another, more truthful reality. But now that reality is not outside of this world, but in a far-away-click, in a Nowhere-Now Here!, a beyond-Already!-Here!, in which the notions that used to be divided into two worlds, attributed to two irreconcilable spheres, have been reunited in one office, in one demiurge.[13] It is no longer a matter of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds of metaphysics, but of the phantasmagoria of telephysics, a remix of both, the one and the other together & happy, in magnificent resolution (full color and live, in direct, digital stereo sound).[14] This is the world in which distant states (estados), incompatible states of dualist metaphysics, have been replaced by the United States (Estados Unidos) of integrated telephysics, globalized telephysics, where the only real is your image and all images are true, as tele-vision is not merely a device, lifestyle,[15] or transnational technology, but a way of making existence into looking at the most distant as if it were the closest and looking at the closest as if it were not true.
 
Tele-vision is not a technology, but a world in which Being has become psycho-image and History, a series of single images—to be recombined and pass from gradual, metaphysical History to simultaneous, US (estadounidense) pantopia. Tele-vision is not a technology, but a world in which processes have become things and later things become images. Tele-vision is not a technology, but a world in which fantasies have become relations and relations become videogames. Tele-vision is not a technology, it is a world in which the distant has become immediate and the immediate becomes infinitely distant. Tele-vision is the epoch in which vision has never been further away.
 
The present has been turned into nostalgia.
 
Psycho-politically, telephysics is the replacement of the metaphysical project by a project in which hegemonic mentality simulates not having power, through images that consciousness takes to be “superior,” but in reality are already outdated states. From advertising to the inspired goals of the jet set,[16] telephysics establishes a truculent distance with whatever already prevails. Telephysics is made of converted regressions in ideals. Telephysics pushes toward psychologically infantile or politically reactionary states considering them non plus ultra.
 
The telephysical fabricates a self-image in which the idealizations of itself—that is to say, the already leading structures—become a mode of co-existence where Otherness is denied.
 
This denied Otherness could be generic, racial, cultural alterity and, subsequently, the denial that a superior state of consciousness exists. It is called nihilism when the denial that there could be a superior state of consciousness that one could access implies the rejection of the game of overseer institutions which make an abstraction out of our participation in them (concealment of co-control). It is indolence when we refuse to advance to a higher state of self-consciousness or, even, when one denies the possibility that such advancement even exists, whisking it away by means of relativist theses or open conformism. Also, telephysics is denoted when the rejection of a higher state of consciousness works in tandem with the fabrication of a mediated life as becoming surrogate and apocryphal aspiration: the spectacle idealizes the status quo.[17] Telephysics is nihilism and indolence that do not desire to recognize that they have lost all beyond fabricating a spurious beyond, a less-than-here, a without-here, an anti-now.
 
The stars that the spectacle places in the convex sky are the insured coins in the inferior pocket. The telephysical promises, in truth, refer to already dominant values. Seducing us toward the Same, seducing us toward nihilism and indolence—as if there were a novel alternative!—, making seductive and attractive, the confirmation of the board of prevailing values is the fundamental function of the spectacle. This is commonly known as success.
 
The spectacle preserves our general state of security. By security I mean to say the desire that the psycho-social structure is not altered. Notice how all the aesthetic, telephysical categories—cool chic! nice!—are relative interjections to this vote for repetition masked as a promise of otherness.[18] Exclamations provided for a false shock.[19] Atelocardias to simulate (avoid) revolution, shock or leap. Telephysics seduces us toward change when in reality it traps us in permanency. This is, additionally, the essence of fashion or tourism.[20]
 
Sancho does not admit that it is he who feeds the deliriums of his owner and who deludes him just to keep playing the role of dominated-manipulated-victim. Sancho does not recognize that Don Quixote and he are two coins with the same face.
 
Tibetan Buddhism predicts that in dying we enter the Bardo state, a post mortem mental region in which all sorts of exciting and terrifying images appear that, if we take them as real by heading toward them or fleeing from them, they will return us through disgrace to the material world, without realizing that all these images are simply a great spectacle of thought still to be overcome. The rattling sounds of fantasy.
 
We are a dying epoch. Sometimes this agony is called Death of God, Death of Man, End of History, End of Modernity, etcetera. In reality, neither these terms nor others are important. These phrases try to portray a nervous state that communicates to us that, paradoxically, we have died and, however, we continue to semi-live. We are exactly in a moment in which we should remember that images that surround us correspond to a spiritual test. If we take those images as truths, in their attractiveness or terror, we remain trapped in Interzone,[21] cryptic name of the United States, which is not a country, but a form of fantastical existence that has lost touch with long processes and the surrounding reality; a mental state in which, between the one and the other, there are thousands of intermediate images that reproduce themselves at each instant.
 
Wisdoms like Buddhism appertain to the metaphysical era; they are its dualist solution and the plan of its illuminated healing. Now another wisdom is necessary. A wisdom with which we are able to depart from the telephysical epoch, where mind, body, emotions, feelings, and co-unconscious stop their production of images. Otherwise, we cannot even return to the world of things. The logical outcome of the telephysical epoch does not allow such return. Telephysics could dematerialize everything. And, thus, for the first time in the history of man, the spirit could “dwell” not in a body, but a zone of nobody, buffer zone or limbo from which there would be no escape.[22] Only an interminable waiting room.
 
And, precisely, this most-spleen-claustrophobia is a feeling generated by the telephysical epoch.[23] The feeling that it will be difficult of impossible to leave it. This idea belongs to telefantasies. Worrying ourselves about leaving an epoch made of pure images is absurd. From an epoch made of pure images one is never able to leave because we had never entered into it.
 
It is unnecessary to resolve the telephysical illusion. We cannot leave this epoch. We never entered it. And in this consists that epoch: in not being able to expire, in prolonging its delusion because it cannot be finished. The telephysical epoch consists of a human being banging his head against a wall, trying to open a gap in the wall in order to get to the other side. Televital man, telephysical being, is necessarily pure. The wall against which he bangs his head does not exist. It is an imaginary wall. The wall is another one of its images.

<AUDIO 1 here>

The moral altitude of man is directly related to his aptitude for self preservation

on the brink of a type 1 society the question becomes how effective is self preservation against ourselves

and what happens when the foundations we’ve built crumble and new heights are just out of reach.

Step one in the matrix

don’t think that you can ever make shit

cus shit makes you and shit breaks you

but shit you can never break shit

Step two repeat step one and this time like you mean it

there aint no sweatin no half stepping

no analyzing your dreams shit

Step three

never turn on the tv

big brother is watching with glee

and his eyes on the prize and the prize is your lies

and your lies are the things you believe til you die

Step four is get ready for

the forgetting and the forfeiting of everything you stand for

these are the demands and the courses

Four horses in the form of the forces

moving through space dragging innocent corpses

torque-less look at the abyss to abort this

But it really dont matter tho

cus everybody sleep

everyone asleep

everyone asleep

Virus in the code

while it’s niggas in the street

niggas in the street

niggas in the street

loops in the system

cant nobody miss em

can’t nobody miss em

can’t nobody miss em

but it really dont matter tho

cus everyone sleep

everyone asleep

everyone asleep

Sleep tight my baby

there’s no need for you to cry

your life is laid out you live it until you die

if he tell you different you tell him to walk on by

foolish pride

Pixelated pistols

computer guided missiles

a rose with forty thistles

arose with forty issues

mama grab tissues

baby grab the ipad

shawty say i miss you

nigga say oh my bad

another bitch off screen

sniffin blow sippin lean

what the fuck do it mean?

the matrix is make believe

Welcome to the world of make believe and you can take your shoes off at the couch

slip into some slippers grab a cup of tea inhale the steam into your mouth

open up your senses only to the moment that is what it’s all about

relax away your inhibition until you realize never was there any doubt

I’m your mama

I’m your daddy

I’m that nigga

In the alley

I’m your dr

When you need

have some coke

have some weed

You know me

I’m your friend

Your main boy

Thick and thin

I’m your pushaman

I’m your pushaman

One time for the pushaman

One time for the pushaman

Two times for the pushaman

Two times for the pushaman

AHH PUSH IT

But it really dont matter though cus everyone asleep

repeat

all the same shit now it’s knee deep

on the edge

maybe you should leap

creepin up yeah we just creep

takin a mothafuckin seat

but it really dont matter though cus everyone asleep

But it really dont matter tho

cus everybody sleep

virus in the code

while it’s niggas in the street

loops in the system

cant nobody miss em

but it really dont matter though

cus everyone asleep

Nothin

these niggas ain’t nothin

im lookin for something so why they all frontin

they sittin here fuckin

they all after me and mine

callin on me and my insanity

stressin a blessin so I keep a weapon

and keep em all guessin

and wettin these niggas who need a new lesson

so who need a new lesson nigga???

Step one in the matrix

don’t think that you can ever make shit

cus shit makes you and shit breaks you

but shit you can never break shit

step two repeat step one and this time like you mean it

there aint no sweatin no half stepping

no analyzing your dreams shit

On August 13, 2013, I got together with Thurston Moore in his flat in Stoke Newington to discuss how his readings in contemporary American poetry influenced some of the songs on the recently-released self-titled album by his post-Sonic Youth band, Chelsea Light Moving. We never really got around to talking about the record, as we spent most of our three or so hours together having a wide-ranging conversation about Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dan Graham, Dee Dee Ramone, Clark Coolidge, Lydia Lunch, and beyond. Below is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of that conversation.
 
DK: I’m really interested in your commitment to poetry. In an interview with Mike Kelley, you said that Beat writers like Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, d.a. levy, William Burroughs, and Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s conceptual art-affiliated journal 0-9 were all “really culturally interesting. And it’s also reflective of a certain aesthetic that is not too dissimilar to punk rock. To me it all sort of leads into what happened with Patti Smith and Television and Ork Records and then going right into Rough Trade. The lineage is really apparent to me. And the people doing the work as artists are very similar to me, even though it’s coming out of hippie culture, which I really like.” How curious that you link Acconci and Mayer’s conceptual work—all that restraint-based, procedural poetry—to the history or at least the aesthetics of punk! I can’t think of any other musician really who might point to a rare 1960s mimeograph magazine that published writers, choreographers, and thinkers like Clark Coolidge, Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer and Jackson Mac Low and say “that’s punk.”

TM: I know that when I first came to New York the people that I was involved with, playing music with, were coming out of art school. The first people I played music with came out of the Rhode Island School of Design. I had no idea or concept of what art school was aesthetically, as far as music was concerned. I knew that Talking Heads came out of RISD, and the first people I met in New York were from that school and they were the ones I connected with and played music with. It seemed that the influx of young people into Manhattan at that time were coming out of art schools, and they were really sort of disparate people. Unlike, say, Lydia Lunch or James Chance who were coming from these places that were a bit more wild …

Myself, I did not come out of art school. I basically just came to New York so I could be part of the music scene, and the people I was involved with would talk about people like Vito Acconci and Dan Graham as people who were precursors to what they were doing. When I met Kim Gordon, she was an artist who had come to New York to be an artist and she had driven cross-country to New York with Mike Kelley, who she was involved with at the time, and she got involved with playing music with Dan Graham. And Dan Graham was somebody who always sort of looked at rock music as something that was really correlative to what he was doing as a conceptual artist. He used ideas from the iconography of rock music, particularly bands like the Kinks, and that was just really interesting to him, what was going on in the lyrics of rock music and how people presented themselves. None of this did I really understand at the time, but I knew by meeting Dan Graham through Kim that he was completely fascinated with rock music and its history.

Hearing about Vito Acconci, doing his performative pieces in New York like Seed Bed where he would lie in a construct under the floor of a gallery masturbating … there was something very sort of punk rock about that! He was considered to be this really heroic figure among people like Glenn Branca. The first place that Sonic Youth started rehearsing was in Vito Acconci’s studio in Brooklyn, and only because the young woman he was involved with was our keyboard player, this woman Anne DeMarinis. Vito Acconci and Dan Graham had this relationship that was really kind of combative in a way, even though at one point they were really connected. What I had figured out was that Vito Acconci came out of the Iowa Writers Workshop and he had aspirations to be a writer, to be a poet, and Dan Graham was coming out of being a conceptual artist, a very idea-driven artist who had some kind of aspiration to get involved with poetry, because he saw poetry as some kind of architectural display.

DK: Sorry Thurston, but what do you mean by “architectural display?” That phrase is curious to me. I was thinking on the train over here about how the poetry in 0-9 very much foregrounded its own materiality.

TM: I think Dan Graham was really interested in how words existed on a page, primarily visually, and almost secondarily in terms of what they were doing subjectively, emotionally on the page, the things they connected to. So, words were very conceptual to him because they were descriptive in creating some kind of visionary situation just by being words. Dan Graham was doing pieces where he was taking instructional texts and placing them on a page and presenting them as the work itself, descriptive practice on the page. That would be the art. He was going towards poetry whereas Vito Acconci was going the other way, he was a poet who was looking at what words were doing on the page and he wanted to leave the page. What would happen if he takes those words and he puts them on the floor, puts them on a wall? Or they just become completely abstracted to the point where they become performative in a way? Vito would do a reading, for example, where he would have a phone at the reading, and instead of him being at the reading he would go to a phone booth en route to the reading and call in and he’d describe where he was to whoever answered the phone, how close he was getting to the reading, and that was his work. And so he was really trying to figure out what he wanted to be as a poet …

DK: Trying to figure out the boundaries between poetry and performance …

TM: Yes, and he subsequently got very involved with using architecture for his ideas and his work as a linguist. All that stuff I sort of gleaned much later on as I got to figure out these gentlemen. But they had this interesting relationship, the two of them. When I met Kim she was in Dan Graham’s camp; when I met Vito’s girlfriend Anne DeMarinis she was in Vito’s camp, and I kind of brought them together. I remember rehearsing in Vito’s place around 1980, and one day Dan Graham came over for a sort of pow-wow at the kitchen table, so there were these two older guys having an intense conversation about Gang of Four’s new record! (Laughs). And I was this young guy, I was like 21, 22 years old … I could see that they were really interested in punk rock because it had this art-school sensibility and they were really interested in that.

Before I don’t think rock ‘n’ roll had that much of an art-school connection. There were a few things here and there, of course. People looked at the Velvet Underground as having that, and there was some realisation that even Iggy coming out of Ann Arbor had an art-school background. The idea of him creating the Stooges was sort of like this rough and tumble rock ‘n’ roll neighbourhood band, and using that, that was his piece, in a way. “I’m going to get these thugs on stage, and that’s me as an artist.” He’s much more loaded than that, obviously, as well, whatever’s going on with Iggy Pop. But I think Dan and Vito saw that as well, they understood that. But now that there were bands in New York like Talking Heads or Television or Patti Smith, Blondie, there was a certain kind of new intellectualism going on in music that really appealed to conceptual artists. Conceptual poets, too, even though they weren’t really referring to it at the time. Vito had this sort of relationship with this woman Rosemary Mayer…

DK: The poet Bernadette Mayer’s sister, right? Bernadette published 0-9 with Acconci…

TM: Yeah … Rosemary had this sister, Bernadette. And I think Vito had published some pieces as “Vito Hannibal Acconci” in a few poetry journals and was involved with this artist Rosemary and her younger sister was interested in poetry and I think the idea for Vito was that he wanted to do a poetry magazine that kind of expanded the idea of how to present text in poetry as a medium. Creating 0-9 was their idea of what to do. Bernadette was coming from a situation where she was involved with this kind of post-Frank O’Hara school centred around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church: poets like Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh etc. Vito really didn’t have too much affinity with that crew, even though he’s said “I may have gone to some of their readings, I may have gone into [Ed Sanders’s] Peace Eye Bookstore at the time, but I still felt pretty alienated from what that community was.” He said he felt alienated from pretty much any community that was happening at the time and Dan Graham was the first one to recognize him and sort of start having galleries show Vito Acconci. It was Artists’ Space in New York, which was a place set up by artists to curate shows for new young artists and I think Dan Graham chose to show Vito as an artist, wanted to present his work independently of poetry journals, poetry publications. So that brought Vito into that milieu.

Then Vito chose an artist to show at Artists’ Space, and being so socially disconnected he asked Dan Graham who he should show and Dan Graham said “You should show this young woman Laurie Anderson.” So Laurie Anderson’s first show at Artists’ Space was via Vito Acconci, but really via Dan Graham, so Dan Graham is really important in that respect. Dan Graham was always very community-minded about what was going on with people as personalities, whereas Vito really didn’t care about that so much, the idea of being collaborative, or being social, and communal, but he did do this magazine 0-9 with Bernadette. I think their idea was to interrelate this kind of contemporary New York School writing, these John Ashbery kind of lines that were filled with very artful non-sequiturs and were simultaneously very visual on the page, and then sort of doing things where they were taking pages out of a Daniel Defoe book, or out of the phonebook, and putting these various kinds of pages together, seeing their connectivity, figuring out what that meant, what that could evoke. That was really smart, and so 0-9 subsequently became this kind of infamous poetry magazine. It really did try to explode what could be considered writing.

DK:  One of the things I’m always moved by when I revisit 0-9 is that the magazine always strikes me as staging, however tacitly, an argument with that Frank O’Haraesque “I do this, I do that” style so beloved by second generation New York School poets like, say, Ted Berrigan and Jim Brodey.

TM: Well, it was. Vito and Bernadette—according to Vito—really had this desire to strip any semblance of emotion out of the work, out of the text.

DK: That basic critique in 0-9 of subjectivity, the authority invested in the speaking “I” is precisely the authority Mayer and Acconci were so intent on contesting. When I was reading your interview with Mike Kelley, I thought to myself, “Is that what Thurston’s picking up on?” You know, that punk critique of togetherness, or, say, the utopian and arguably ridiculous idea that everyone can be a poet. Not to denigrate Frank O’Hara by any means, who was of course a fabulous poet, but many of the writers coming out of St. Mark’s during the 1960s were in essence writing the same great poem, letting the reader know precisely when and where they had an ice-cream, what pills they took, what they were smoking, or who they met for lunch. They were adapting O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” style that he got across so brilliantly in poems like “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean Paul” (the one that starts “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch / ah lunch! I think I am going crazy / what with my terrible hangover”). 0-9 marked a break from all that in favour of a more concept-driven aesthetic.

TM: More minimalist, right? I’d be curious to see more literature about how minimalism presaged punk rock. Punk rock was always this sort of thing, this kind of reclamation of rock ‘n’ roll which at the time was sinking into a morass of being flowery and overwrought and subscribing to high technique … and then of course the Ramones come in. And the Ramones was this kind of high-concept band that I always suspected were a kind of glam variant of minimalism: the leather jacket and jeans, this uniform look, it’s almost like the Bay City Rollers! (laughs). It was around the same time! When that first Ramones album came out, there was a lot of talk about how this was coming out of minimalism. These are not academics though, these are weirdos from outside the margins who are doing something that is so pure …

DK: Well, there was Arturo Vega, who was sort of the Ramones’ artistic director, right? He had an art-school background.

TM: Yes, Arturo Vega! Now there’s a really interesting guy, and no one ever really thinks about that … the fact that the Ramones were so allowing of this effete kind of artist, this gay Svengali figure telling them “This is how you’ll look.” That’s really curious. The lyrics and music on the first Ramones record, the fact that they were so pared down and repetitive, so minimal … it was really exciting!

DK: So we can draw a line from, like, Sol LeWitt to the Ramones?

TM: Yeah! The Sol LeWitt people were responding to the Ramones! They were going to see the Ramones, Dan Graham was certainly going to Ramones shows, and even more so going to see the No Wave bands, bands that had even less to do with any reference to R & B, or really any kind of rock ‘n’ roll. Bands like the Sex Pistols who came around and said “We’re here to destroy rock ‘n’ roll” were still playing rock ‘n’ roll, whereas Lydia Lunch and Pat Place and Arto Lindsay weren’t playing even any semblance of rock ‘n’ roll, they were playing something wholly other. That connection became really interesting to me, the fact that it became a place where a lot of the energy in the art world suddenly started going. A lot of the dialogue that started happening around those bands in 1976 and ’77 was coming from the art world. It had less to do with anything coming out of the music culture and more to do with what was coming out of the art culture, as far as dialoguing about that. Patti Smith was coming out of this relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Talking Heads were coming out of art school, and even Richard Hell had his dalliances with art world women! (Laughs). The whole Patty Oldenburg connection …

Dan Graham has written about it in his Rock / Music Writings to some degree, though he’s fairly impenetrable sometimes in his writings, Dan is really … perverse as well, but he’s one of the few people I know in art-world culture who can talk about the Dead Boys and Henny Youngman in the same breath. I’ve seen him in symposiums where somebody like Benjamin Buchloh will be giving a talk that’s so intellectually rigid, and then Dan Graham will stand up and comment on it, and unlike anyone else who might comment on it in an equally rigid way, Dan will jump from Bruce Springsteen to Bow Wow Wow … he’ll jump to all these sorts of things and everyone just gasps. But he’s also completely able to stay in tandem with academia. He’s this wild card.

DK: Did any of that austere work in 0-9 actually influence you personally as a musician? Did you ever sit down and think to yourself, “How can I translate some of these text works into musical sounds? Can these works affect the way I’m thinking as a composer?”

TM: No, I didn’t even really see 0-9 until way after. Those poetry journals had a very limited shelf life. I wasn’t really aware of it until I started getting into really collecting and archiving underground poetry publications. And then seeing Vito Hannibal Acconci’s name mentioned in these magazines coming out of New York, like Extensions, which would have a mix of art and poetry writings, writing by people like Stanley Broun, Dan Graham, alongside poetry by Ted Berrigan. That was really interesting to me, finding out about Warhol’s flirtation with the poetry world. Warhol was romanticizing the poetry scene taking place in the East Village at Cafe Le Metro— if you read Reva Wolf’s book Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s she talks in detail about those connections. All those kinds of things fascinated me. And I got more into it as I collected more and more of these fugitive little magazines. It was Richard Hell who sort of got me into it, and Byron Coley, who was the one that turned me on to d.a. levy. We started looking at all this Cleveland 1960s stuff, which had this Middle American style, and that was what we liked about Pere Ubu and Devo, a real heartland of punk rock. American punk rock. That relationship in Cleveland with Peter Laughner, and then Television in New York … you know, in 1974 Television actually went to Cleveland and played with Rocket from the Tombs. Peter Laughner’s sort of this drunken aesthete … so looking into all that stuff, and being into the publications of Patti Smith, Richard Hell … you know …

Before I had even heard Patti Smith, I was reading her small press poetry, because she was a rock writer, publishing poetry and criticism in places like Creem magazine, and I remember reading Patti’s poems, and being enamoured by that, thinking “What’s going on? This person’s picture looks amazing,” and then seeing her name in Rock Scene, where she wrote that first piece in 1974 about Television. That was really resonant for me. At first I thought that it was a piece on television—you know, the medium! And then I saw that it was a piece on the band, and I found that so jarring: why would a band call themselves “Television?” You know, they might as well have called themselves “Door.” That whole aesthetic of investing energy in something that was banal, there’s something about that that really fascinates me. The guys in Television all had short hair, that was just like, nobody goes on stage with short hair! Everything about it was completely curious. Patti’s writing was really amazing too, she was writing things like “This guitar sounds like a thousand bluebirds screaming.” What does that sound like, you know?

DK: I remember a related article where Patti Smith describes Tom Verlaine’s neck as “Real swan like. The kind of neck you want to strangle.”

TM: Exactly! That was what led me into the writing. I remember driving into New York and going to Gotham Book Mart and buying her books. That was really great. We always thought about it in a very literary way. Verlaine and Patti had a book called The Night, and there was a poem by Richard Hell and Patti published somewhere, so there was all this poetry around… like even more glammy punky people like Cherry Vanilla wrote poems, you know!

DK: That’s funny … one of my favourite finds in the Richard Hell Papers at Fales Library, NYU is a letter David Johansen wrote to Richard Hell asking him “So when are you going to publish my poems?”

TM: Well, being a poet then was being a performer, one was in the business, you know?

DK: So many of these musicians did come out of the poetry world, the scene going on at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church …

TM: Yes, like Lydia Lunch comes down from Rochester as a 16 year old, and the way she talks about it is she has a fistful of poems and is trying to get people to acknowledge them and everybody’s like “Get away kid, you’re bothering me,” except for Lenny Kaye. That connection’s really interesting, because Lydia denounced Patti Smith to such a degree where she was proclaiming “The first person I’m going to get rid of is Patti Smith, I’ve had enough of this barefoot hippie shit.” I saw that as Lydia’s scheme of aggression, because Patti was great, she was untouchable, she was the sacred persona of the scene. When I first read this interview with Lydia in the Soho Weekly News—I lived down the street from Lydia at the time, though I didn’t really know her—where she was basically just defiling Patti Smith, I was completely and utterly shocked. But the way she was saying it was so acerbic and funny, it was like “Wow, you’re someone who’s really asking for it.”

Patti did come out of the hippie scene. The whole punk thing was just kind of served to her, obviously. The fact that what she was doing was referencing garage rock through Lenny Kaye … Richard Hell was just like “They are the most boring band that I’ve ever seen. They were bar rock. We were all doing these weirdo rock moves, even in Television, and in the Voidoids, and even the Heartbreakers had alcohol and heroin going for them, and these guys were just a bar-rock band with a very intense personality as lead singer.” There’s a lot to be said about that band and how powerful they were, but it was really all about Patti.

So it was kind of interesting to see Patti Smith attacked by Lydia Lunch, it was completely different, it had nothing to do with togetherness at all. And it wasn’t about fighting or breaks between generations. Lydia was there in 1975, you know, she was at the infamous Lower Manhattan Ocean Club show where Lou Reed, John Cale, Patti Smith and David Byrne all put on a gig together, which for me…when I started reading about that event in Rock Scene magazine and seeing pictures of it, that was such a significant event for me! The Velvet Underground with Patti Smith and the Talking Heads…I thought of that show as marking the beginning of the next phase. It was amazing because it was recorded, but it’s only in the last few years that I got to hear those recordings.

DK: Clark Coolidge was published in 0-9, and his work I think can be seen as marking another shift away from the gossipy, chatty style affiliated with the second generation New York School poets and towards a much more conceptually-oriented poetry / theory world. I wonder if you could talk a bit about your interest in Clark’s work. You’ve been performing with him recently, I know, playing and recording improvised music together and with Anne Waldman …

TM: The fact that Coolidge was in 0-9 alongside poets like Aram Saroyan, who was writing these one-word poems … I actually asked Vito about that, and he said, “Well, that was mostly Bernadette.” Those people were there because Bernadette was wanting to go more towards a place where language became sort of naked. Vito said that they were both wanting to find writers who were breaking away from the chattiness of New York confessional poetry. But Vito was mostly into moving away from any semblance of “personality.” Vito’s whole thing was like “I’m going to copy François Villon out of a book and that’s going to be art.” His practice was really just to distance ourselves from personality, having fun with the work, so I think Clark and Aram were more in Bernadette’s scope. But even Vito said, “Oh my god, here’s this poet putting one word on a page!” Of course that completely appealed to him, how could it not?

But Clark? I never knew what to think about Clark Coolidge because I saw his work as being … I didn’t really sort of feel like it compelled me to read it in full, and therefore it became curious to me as work that didn’t aspire to be read, but rather to simply exist as something to contemplate. I thought it was OK, but I don’t think it extended beyond my admiration for just accepting it as some kind of artful exercise. I first became really aware of him when he read at the Poetry Project opening for Cecil Taylor. And I went specifically to see Cecil Taylor read. Cecil had just issued an LP on Leo Records of him reading his poems, and his reading had a lot to do with vocal ululation kind of sound stuff and then he would read writing that was really perverse, lines about architectural ideas, descriptive of architecture, thinking about how Cecil Taylor as an improviser goes into playing where he has these ideas of building and structure … Clark read before him and he sat on a stool pushing his hair back and reading non-stop this litany of non-sequiturs for close to 30 or 40 minutes without hesitation or an “um.” I was completely enamoured and fascinated by who this guy was and what he just did. I was like, “OK, that was kind of great.” And I went up to him afterwards and I asked him about playing in David and Tina Meltzer’s band Serpent Power, and we talked about that a little bit.

Clark was living in Great Barrington at the time, and he would come to a couple of Michael Ehler’s gigs that he promoted at the Unitarian Church in Amherst, and I played a show with a drummer from Hartford called Randall Colburn, a free jazz drummer who played with Paul Flaherty. We did a duo, and the place was packed, and right before we got on Randall Colburn lit up a joint and I took a couple of hits off of it, and it was so narcotic that I went upstairs, and by the time we started playing I became completely freaked out—paranoid, and the music was just not … like I couldn’t … I felt really discombobulated … we kind of rampaged through the set for what it was. Clark was there. Someone said to me “Hey, cool, Clark Coolidge is here!” And I thought, “Oh, great, I’m playing like I don’t even really know what I’m doing.” I didn’t know what I was doing. It was like, throw a monkey in front of a typewriter kind of thing. Years later, I wrote to Clark (he had relocated to the West Coast, Petaluma) asking him for some writing for a poetry journal I was editing. We got a dialogue going, and I told him, well, I remember playing at this thing and you were there, and I told him that same story. And he was really gracious. He said “Well actually, my memory of the event is quite different from yours, because I remember thinking it was an amazing piece of music!” And I was like “Oh man, that’s so nice of you to say that.”

Maybe I saw Clark read once or twice in New York since then, but in 2012 he was on the summer faculty at Naropa for the third week, and I was due to be there for the fourth week, so I got there a week early because I wanted to hear him do his thing. Clark Coolidge was teaching Clark Coolidge, going from book to book chronologically. I was there on the third day and there was a bit of a mutiny in his class. Clark had said “I don’t want anybody to write, I don’t want any writing, I just want you to listen. That’s what I’m teaching.” I thought that was great, but the students were like, “But we came here to write. We want to write. Give us our writing!” Clark just said “There’s not going to be any time for writing. You can write while I talk, that’s fine.” So I went to his class, there were maybe five or six students in there, and I just took notes during the whole lecture, which I read the next night at a student reading. Then I read it again in the studio at Naropa with Clark playing drums. I bring all this up because in his class he really elucidated what I liked about his work, when I wasn’t quite sure what I liked about his work. The point was that he was a musician who was composing notes on a page, turning linguistics into music and vice-versa. So when he mentioned that, it became pretty apparent, and then he started reading those sections of some of his writing, talking about bop, and talking about Kerouac as a jazz musician. So that became really interesting to me, it elucidated his work for me in a real way, and it gave me a new-found way of enjoying his work. And then the Poetry Project had a book launch for one of Clark’s books, and a lot of us read from it, and it was really enjoyable to read Clark Coolidge.

DK: Before I even knew Coolidge was a drummer, I remember thinking how percussive his poems were … listening to him reading from The Maintains and some of the earlier work, for example …

TM: And also his wit. His wit in so much of the work that … I know how important Clark’s work was for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, but I’ve gotta say I like that fun element in Clark’s work. It makes me think of Ted Berrigan’s term “language meanies.”

DK: Well, now that you’ve mentioned L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, I get to ask you about this flyer I came across. It was advertising an event in 1982 based at the Public Theater, and it promised “Language and noise will be featured during the first two ‘Poets at the Public’ programs for this year. Tomorrow, writers who explore the limits of language and are called ‘language’ writers will read from their recent works. They are James Sherry, Hannah Wiener, Peter Seaton, Michael Gottleib, Charles Bernstein, and Bruce Andrews. The ‘noise music’ movement, a product of the downtown art community, will be represented by the Sonic Youth Band and David Rosenbloom’s Experimental Chorus and Orchestra.”

TM: I totally remember that show! That show came about … I remember the invitation to it came via Josh Baer, who co-owned Neutral Records and was a director at White Columns Gallery. Josh Baer was a young moneyed guy, and we had some connection to White Columns through Kim’s connection to certain artists who were showing there at the time—artists like Jenny Holzer—and Kim was working at this gallery in Soho that was directed by the woman who first showed Jean Michel Basquiat… there was all that sort of connective stuff going on … and Josh Baer let Kim curate a show. I think she had different artists do record covers, a record covers show. Everyone was in it, Lawrence Weiner was in it, Dan Graham was in it, Glenn Branca was in it, I even had a little thing in it. Josh had something to do with Sonic Youth being the band that represented the burgeoning noise-music scene coming out of a post-No Wave … no one ever called it “noise music,” they called it No Wave, or they called it “atonal.” Some would just call it unlistenable, it was very polarizing within the scene itself, but as soon as the primary participants, people like Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay, Mars, James Chance and the Contortions, as soon as any of these people played any semblance of rock ‘n’ roll music, it was over. As soon as Lydia Lunch did 8-Eyed Spy, which was basically a boogie-rock group, but a very good one, and Pat Place starts the Bush Tetras, James Chance becomes more James Brown, things like that, the Raybeats, garage rock…all very good stuff, but it wasn’t No Wave anymore, it was post-No Wave, and that’s where Sonic Youth starts.

The idea of “noise” really came out of us doing a show at White Columns that Josh Baer asked me to curate, an underground music show that was sort of similar to what was so sensational at Artists’ Space a couple of years prior with the No Wave bands. Brian Eno was there, No New York, all that kind of stuff, and I said, “Well, yeah.” A lot of it had to do with Sonic Youth trying to get a show at this uptown club called Hurrah, and the proprietor of that place would never let us play there and he was closing the place down actually and in an interview he said “I don’t really feel like there’s a music scene here anymore, all these demos I get from bands is just noise.” And that’s where we got the idea to call the White Columns event the “Noise Fest.” There were older people on the scene who were talking about noise as coming out of an academic composer movement, but as far as noise and rock, no one was really using the term “noise rock,” so the idea of a noise fest became really pronounced. A three-day festival became a nine-day festival, because everybody came out of the woodwork, and it was like “Oh, here’s a forum for us, we don’t actually have to go and kneel down before Hilly Kristal, this is an open door for us.” It was a really big deal. That was very early for Sonic Youth, I think maybe we had just got our name together, we still had our keyboard player Anne DeMarinis, Lee Ranaldo wasn’t with us at the time but he played there. Lee comes into the band late ’80, early ’81 …

DK: I love the idea of you guys playing alongside Charles Bernstein a year later …

TM: Well, across from White Columns was the Ear Inn, and Ear Inn was this place where a lot of these language poetry activities took place. I had an awareness of this stuff, but to me it was like these older generations who were committed to a writing scene, and back then my only interests were what was going on in the music world, tangentially with the art world, but it was all about being in a band.

But the society was such that writers, artists, and musicians were all hanging around the same scenes. You had the writers across the street, so I was satisfied seeing Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs at the Mudd Club or CBGBs. To go to the Poetry Project to actually get involved with what was going on … Ted Berrigan was still reading there, Joe Brainard … my God, in retrospect I wish I had hung out there, but I was too young. I didn’t think I was going to get seriously into poetry, even though people like Barbara Barg, Susie Timmons, Eileen Myles were around, but it didn’t mean anything to me. There was no poetry scene that was going on that was directly informing Sonic Youth at the time. My writing, my notebooks, wasn’t correlative with what was going on at the Poetry Project. I didn’t have any real awareness of what that lineage was, even though I knew a little bit about it from being there. I didn’t really know what the structure was then. There was nobody telling me about it, it was another thing happening in the landscape. It was quite a while before I would actually see Ted Berrigan walking around all the time, and I’ve always said to his son Anselm that I thought he was a cult leader!

DK: Which he sort of was!

TM: (Laughs) It’s funny because I bought books all the time and I read all the time and I would hang out at St. Mark’s Bookshop and the one across the street which was called East Village Books, and the last remaining used booksellers on 4^th Avenue, and I was always in these places. I think about the stacks of mimeos I would push out of the way back then and it’s painful, but no one gave any credence to that stuff back then, they were just transient publications, communications between poets … For me writing lyrics and Sonic Youth was really just coming out of a void. Confusion is Sex, writing lyrics like “Confusion is next,” came out of Henry Miller. Sister came out of reading Philip K. Dick. Richard Hell’s lyrics were really important. The Ramones lyrics, really important. Talking Heads lyrics, really important. Patti Smith, really important. These were pretty key poets within that context, working within a form that I was in, so I didn’t really need to go and read Ron Padgett.

In a way Richard Hell was really significant because he was publishing. He published Cuz, which allowed me to draw some lines. And then Byron Coley started turning me on to underground press stuff … there was a book called Cunt, that was John Giorno. I started seeing that stuff, and I thought that it was like what we were doing with records, as far as independent means of production, but it was even more underground. It was the same thing that led me into the improvised music world, with people like Derek Bailey. That was even more on the margins of what we in Sonic Youth thought we were doing. We thought we were the most marginalized hipsters in the world and this stuff was even more so. It made me want to investigate it and get involved with it, certainly improvised music, and it was poetry publications that got me into the poetry. I started amassing this stuff, I started reading it, I started figuring out what it meant historically, and it really helped that it had a lot to do with Richard Hell … to find the magazine Buffalo Stamps coming out of Buffalo, which actually printed Richard Meyers (Hell) and Tim Miller (Verlaine)…

DK: And Richard published Bruce Andrews in his little magazine Genesis: Grasp in the late 1960s …

TM: Bruce told me he still has a letter from Richard accepting some of his poems. But anyway, our connection to people like Barbara Barg, Susie Timmons, that’s all there … Richard Edson, the first drummer on our first record, was doing Poetry Project stuff …

DK: That’s right, he took a poetry workshop led by Lewis Warsh …

TM: He’s published in some of the early mimeos, and we knew about it, and I thought, “that’s cool,” but the connections were more physical than they were in practice.

DK: I remember an earlier conversation we had when you were in Brighton, when you told me how disappointed you were in finding out that Brian Eno’s lyrics on Here Come the Warm Jets were produced procedurally. He employed Burroughs-style cut-up, arbitrary nonsense words, phrases generated randomly while skimming through his notebooks, that kind of stuff. Cagean chance operations. That is to say, his lyrics—and whatever meaning the listener got out of them—weren’t intentional in the traditional sense of that word.

TM: Yes, Here Come the Warm Jets was such a defining record for me, and what he was singing lyrically was so evocative to me, so humorous, not afraid of being smart. It dealt with a lot of things that were moving forward from any kind of hippie aesthetic, and in a way I thought that record was one of the great documents, a bridge from 60s fallout aesthetics into punk rock. I always thought there must have been some kind of narrative sense in those lyrics. But I never really debated it or anything, I just figured he was a great lyricist. I found a lot of exciting descriptive visions going on in those lyrics. But I never thought about what they “meant.”

I still have this whole thing, like somebody in a classroom if a difficult text is being discussed and someone says, “Well, I don’t get it, I don’t know what that means …” I always say something like, “It’s not predicated on you getting it, on its meaning anything,” as far as poetry and music go. These aren’t scientific essays. It’s all about evocations, so for you to disparage it because you don’t get it … I even had this conversation with a member of Public Enemy in the common room of a studio we were both working in during the late 1980s when we were doing Daydream Nation and they were doing It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The television was on and there was something interesting on TV that had to do with John Cage or something, it was really fun, and we were all looking at it and saying “That’s great,” and the guy from Public Enemy was saying “Yeah, it’s pretty cool, but I don’t get it.” And we talked about it, and I was saying it wasn’t about getting anything, it’s about work that is open to the senses. To have to employ meaning to work like that … I always have a pretty reactionary response to that!

So with Eno, it wasn’t about getting Eno’s lyrics, but I always thought there was something more to it than what I heard … and when I found out he basically just threw sentences down on the page I kind of bristled at the time. They were throw-away! They could be replaced very easily with something else! They weren’t necessary. I had invested so much pleasure listening and thinking about those lyrics that it kind of disturbed me to find out how arbitrary they were. But I’ve come to terms with it. It’s funny that you mention this, because I’ve managed to find new pleasure (to quote Richard Hell!) listening to that record now that I know what I know.

DK: I want to go back to your affection for the Ramones. I’ve been thinking about why I reacted so wildly and positively to their song “Beat on the Brat” the first time I heard it. And, well, I know why. It’s all about the way Joey Ramone enunciates the “t” at the end of “brat.”

TM: Oh yeah, oh yeah! Joey Ramone’s pronunciation is very unusual, it’s like a faux English accent, which I thought was really remarkable.

DK: At the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, it’s when Joey Ramone goes “Beat on the brat-tt” that’s the real “art moment” in the song. He “releases” the “t.” I asked a linguist colleague of mine at the University of Sussex, Lynne Cahill, to comment on that released “t,” and she wrote, “The ‘t’ is generally described as a stop consonant (or a plosive). That means that the sound is produced by the release of air after a complete closure in the mouth. What’s interesting here is that, at the ends of words, plosives are often unreleased. Compare the sound at the end of ‘brat’ in the first and second ‘beat on the brat’ with the sound at the end of ‘brat’ in ‘with a brat like that.’ In the first, he has released the ‘t,’ which makes it much more audible. In the second, it is unreleased, as is more normal, and is to all intents and purposes inaudible as a separate sound.”

TM: Yes, exactly, and I agree with your “art moment” comment. “Beat on the Brat” is really the cornerstone. Dee Dee wrote the song, Dee Dee, the most wild and uneducated member of the band, living on impulse the whole time, reading comic books, having a band. The beauty of that is astounding. To write a song like “Beat on the Brat,” his influence there is a sort of childlike gaze at the Katzenjammer Kids. It’s just completely remarkable, how it came from this childlike persona.

DK: Again, in a funny sort of way I was really moved earlier when you talked about minimalism feeding into a lot of this music because I’ve always thought of the Ramones and Warhol along the same lines, in the sense of their shared bland glee in the face of daily life …

TM: Yes, the participants having a real engagement with the work … I talked to Tom Verlaine about Dee Dee, and he told me that when Television were having try-outs for bass players, Dee Dee came, and Tom said that he and the rest of the band knew about him already in a way, because they’d been talking about Ramones people, but he couldn’t play. I mean, he literally did not know how to play bass. But he just really wanted to be there! There’s an interview with the Ramones, I think it’s in the movie “Punking Out,” and Dee Dee’s there and in his Queens accent he says “Have you seen Television? I really really like Television.” And there’s Television, a band playing really intricate music with lyrics coming from French surrealism, and Dee Dee Ramone’s just completely engaged with them. It’s not that he just wants to sit around listening to lunkhead rock. Dee Dee was the chief songwriter at least for their first few records. Now was Dee Dee Ramone thinking “I’m consciously being informed by minimalist tendencies”? I don’t think so. But at the same time there’s a certain peripheral resonance going on. Osmosis. Some of the practices going on at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s, and Sonic Youth, it may not be direct but there’s a lot of osmosis, shared practices, peripheral resonances going on. Richard Edson being in Sonic Youth and coming to us from the Poetry Project …

DK: Even Rhys Chatham was publishing poems in The Soho Weekly News …

TM: And I was writing poems, too … my God, in retrospect, I would have done anything to be in Bernadette Mayer’s class in 1978. Things might have turned out differently in my life then, who knows?

DK: Well, it’s probably for the best. You may have made the dreadful mistake of becoming a full-time poet …

TM: (laughs) Yeah, I might have.

DK: But obviously poetry’s now very much in your life! In your Chelsea Light Moving album, your song “Heavenmetal” refers to “last night’s magic workshop.” Is that a reference to Jack Spicer’s “Poetry as Magic” workshops he used to hold in the San Francisco Public Library?

TM: Yeah.

DK: I know of no other rock song that references Jack Spicer! What informed you here?

TM: That was definitely written for poetry fanatics. I’ve been discovering Spicer’s world these last few years, particularly through Peter Gizzi’s and Kevin Killian’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, and Lewis Ellingham’s and Killian’s Poet Be Like God , those two tomes were just really big. Spicer, he was just such an iconoclast. Learning about him led me to learning a lot more about the San Francisco Renaissance, what it was, and I really want to read Lisa Jarnot’s Duncan biography, The Ambassador from Venus. It just seems wonderful to me, that whole scene, the young Joanne Kyger, the magic workshop, the way poetry was seen to be part of their human condition. To me that was really interesting because it lent itself to a certain thought process I was having about reading and writing poetry in the context of a community which I’ve been becoming more active in over the last ten years or so. I started looking at poets reading the way I would look at bands playing, thinking about what worked and what didn’t work. A lot of the times when I would see poets read I would think to myself, “Don’t explain your poems, don’t give me a background on the poem, don’t tell me where it’s coming from, don’t talk!” A certain element of mystery gets diffused when that happens. Reading Spicer’s history, and reading his poetry, and then to come across this intense enlightenment he had in terms of his writing the ongoing, serial poem, where he basically said to himself “These poems can be liberated, by being part of this continuum,” that enlightenment being part of the magical quality … I thought about that because when I was first asked to do some readings with established poets at the Poetry Project or whatever, I knew that I was being asked because they understood “Here’s a guy from this world who’s really interested in our world.” I basically would read like that, I would have maybe a dozen poems but I would read them as one piece. That had a lot to do with how I was writing lyrics, where I was taking aspects of poems from different places and then create another piece, which basically was the lyric.