Category: Volume 19 – Number 3 – May 2009

In many ways, one might see Alan Liu’s collection, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database, as a kind of retrospective or career long response to the issues raised by Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker’s individual reviews in the journal Criticism of his earlier book, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. While Liu directly responds in the same issue with “Understanding Knowledge Work” to Hayles’s and Drucker’s queries regarding the definition and function of history and aesthetics–indeed regarding the very “future of the humanities”–in the information age, his Local Transcendence takes the discussion much further and into the world of methodology. In Local Transcendence, Liu not only maps out a critical approach that will draw together the diverse terrains of the humanities, arts, information, and technology, but also argues that this very interdisciplinarity is the crux of the method. Interdisciplinarity as method is vital not so much due to the breadth of data revealed, that is as additional content in itself, but rather because it produces a “line of flight” away from established and rigid knowledge systems to an “unclosed otherness” (Local 185).
 
The question for Liu is: can there be an open method for history that can tell us anything politically instructive or ethically useful, especially in an age that has seen the so-called “death of theory,” “death of history,” “death of the author,” “death of the subject,” “death of cinema,” etc.? What, for Liu, is left in the absence of essential meanings except as Liu notes a sense of the “cool?” The “cool” as Liu defines it is basically whatever brand we have decided to take on from our corporate and media-saturated culture. Our larger fascination with endless flows of information and with perpetual innovation, a world-view of “creative destruction,” leaves us awash in data but strips the world of past knowledge that can anchor the present (Local 2-4). In such an environment, we do not have history but rather historicism–that is, only the signs or the effect(s) of a history (4). Moreover, for Liu our path of resistance comes from within our “cool culture” as a strategy of reversal or “destructive creation” and also from within postmodern historicism by turning its symptomatic “contingency” into a method (Local 11; “Understanding” 250). Ultimately, Liu maps out both the logic and critical method for our era of “remix culture,” a phrase perhaps more apt than “information age” at capturing the blurred worlds of creation/consumption, art/culture, data/media, form/content, persona/person, public/private of the current epoch.
 
To understand the feasibility and value of Liu’s method as detailed in Local Transcendence–as well as to situate his work in relation to a range of current remix practices from the archive to the arts to rhetorical strategies–it is useful to turn to the Hayles and Drucker essays. Both Hayles and Drucker take issue with Liu’s “destructive creativity” as a value either for the arts or for the humanities. On the one hand, Hayles notes that this assumes a ubiquity of corporate culture in which we are trapped and can act only as borderline terrorists, albeit “critically” destructive ones. As Hayles quite rightly points out, the presumed corporate cultural “trap” and attendant critical subversion confirm the status quo via the negation or erasure of history since they effectively eliminate the possibility of imagining a counter-history or alternative positive possible pathways of resistance (236-239). Drucker is equally troubled by Liu’s vision for the arts as “destructive,” since it replays what she believes are tired oppositions from aesthetic discourses regarding the “resistance” of art (and specifically of the avant-garde) to dominant social/popular cultural order. Rather than a didactic or utopian purpose for the arts, Drucker says she prefers “embodied examples of a practice that has no purpose whatsoever except to be” (246-47).
 
Of course, the discussion of the shape, objective, indeed possibility of history and the arts haunts these essays and Liu’s books, that is, what should teaching and scholarship look like given that the objects of study are themselves in question? Drucker argues for no less than an “overhaul” of academics from the object of study (“static artifacts”) to its purpose (“self-improvement” “moral uplift”) (“Games”). While “cultural preservation,” “critical thought,” and “artful expression” are core values retained in Drucker’s educational re-tooling, the revolution in digital media is not insignificant in shaping the new practice. The tools of digital media are not in themselves the core, but rather what one learns from the engagement or more specifically the practice of these tools–that is, a diverse and flexible set of skills across a range of informational, expressive, reflective and critical tasks (Drucker 246).
 
Liu’s direct response to Drucker (and to Hayles) in his Criticism essay follows closely on Drucker’s (new) media literacy/fluency model, and indeed, he points to their collective work in assorted digital humanities initiatives that reflect the core values noted above. But a fault line appears towards the end of the essay when Liu draws a parallel between the objectives of formalist “close readings” and his own postmodernist approach in line with “deeply felt human ‘experience,’” which he claims shares an affinity with Drucker’s and Hayles’s attention in their work to “experience” and “embodiment,” respectively (“Understanding” 257). Setting aside whether or not these multiple uses and related terms share precisely the same meaning, it is more useful here that Liu’s comment seem to confirm that we are now forever in a culture of remix (and may very well always have been) from which nothing “new” or outside can emerge. While Drucker and Hayles may not give up all hope of the “new,” Liu implicitly exchanges this for the larger goal of education: “humanity” (252).
 
Is the “humanity” that Liu pursues from within “postmodern historicism” any different qualitatively from the formalist, romanticist, or indeed enlightenment individualized notions of the self, something from which our postmodern “cool” must surely diverge? In Local Transcendence Liu both draws important connections between seemingly disparate forms–especially between romanticism and postmodernism–and shows how such linkages provide an insight into his method of “contingency” and have implications for our contemporary “humanity.”
 
Both romanticism and postmodernism offer an important counter-movement to the singular rational historical line followed by the Enlightenment and to the current techno-instrumentalist teleology of “innovation” (Local 7). Moreover, both romanticism and postmodernism offer an aesthetic or style that can set out the principles to an historicist, i.e., non-unitary, method. Liu’s discussion of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) points to the crucial romantic component–and key historicist principle–of immersion, and connects that quality to the “localism” and attention to contextual detail found in historicism. Further, Liu notes that Wordsworth seems to dislocate description from historical time as he blurs past and present temporality into a “now” (13). Thus within this aesthetic/critical frame, we are “in” or “immersed” in history and yet “free from history”–another key principle–that is, set loose from contextual and temporal blind spots and able to see “alternative pathways between past and future” (20).
 
Liu’s third chapter meticulously explores the nuances and workings of “context” within cultural criticism. He notes that while it is necessary to provide detail for cultural criticism, it is not a sufficient basis for his critical approach and is at times a hindrance to what he believes should be the postmodern historicist objectives. Too often detail and cultural context are set up in stark opposition to theory and method, but in fact the rigidity of this resistance to theory, not to mention the reification of anti-method, turns into a deterministic method in and of itself (116). Here we are at the heart of his critique from within postmodern historicism, which is that detail and especially the mechanics of historicist detail conceived as a densely layered repetitive loop of struggle and resistance lead to a totalizing, detached, and far too comfortable observation of culture (137). More specifically, the sheer volume of detail, as well as its reiterative nature, makes this a “faceless” enterprise that turns away from the needed “emancipation seeded within, but not without ethical choice [that is] able to emerge from, the complexity of the past” (136, 21).
 
If the ethical turn brings us back to the question of “humanity,” Liu’s situating of our “choice” as both within and without history shifts the ground from the unique and highly individualized romantic self, but not to one completely in the domain of the “cool” postmodern “subjectivity.” That said, the model for ethical choice and thus our method of contingent postmodern historicism is derived for Liu from the intersection of–or perhaps rather the related rhetoric found within–romanticism and postmodernism, which we might label as assemblage, montage, or remix depending upon the context and media forms we might implement. Time and again, Liu references Wordsworth and the romantics for their nonlinear pathways, a skipping between, zigzagging around time and objects as illustrative of the contingent method. Perhaps more significantly, he likens the contingent “method” to a chain of modernist and postmodern “reverie,” encompassing cubism, Eisensteinian montage, and ultimately, less directly but logically, the database form.
 
Like Drucker, Liu invokes digital media as important historicist tools not for any utopian qualities they have themselves, nor primarily for the media fluency required in our digital age (which Drucker promotes), but precisely for the rhetorical opportunities they present towards a method. Ethical choice, without moral determinism or relativism -that is to say, “humanity” without singularity, universals, or moral anarchy–comes from a strategic engagement with information (117). Here, Liu’s commentary on the “pragmatics” of interdisciplinarity is instructive about his idea that rhetoric and diverse media forms are central to his method. An interdisciplinary approach is not important because it transcends traditional boundaries (since it often only establishes other larger ones) but because it can help us rethink the assumptions and boundaries within our own “home” disciplines. It accomplishes this through the movement or translation of information from one discipline (or format) to another. As Liu notes, the “relation between the home discipline and the other or exotic discipline is really the relation between what might be termed a convention and a figure for knowledge”–in effect, a tropology–whose goal is “the very art of doing an end run around epistemological closure in order to say the impossible” (181). Visual media, images, extend that gap between convention and figure, or rather open up more possible pathways against closure (183).
 
The digital and networked world transforms the translation of information exponentially but also qualitatively. For Liu, that is, digital data’s immaterial “base” facilitates exchange from one format to another, one receiver to another, thereby erasing form/content distinctions (234-35). Importantly, however, data translation occurs as the result of a highly structured consistent logic, meaning that this “open-ended” movement occurs within a “closed” system, and thus potentially ensnares us within the ethos of the endless circulation of meaningless signs. How then does the digital fit within Liu’s paradigm–can it maintain the ethical turn and “humanity” within this structure? Here it is important to remember that Liu’s strategy is not simply one of movement and displacement; it is a contingent, not random methodology. Liu closes the eighth chapter, “Transcendental Data: Towards a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse,” by asking, “what experience of the structurally unknowable can still be conveyed in the structured media of knowledge (databases, XML, and so on)? Perhaps the arts–if they can just crack the code of ordinary cool and make it flower–know” (236).
 
While Liu prioritizes the arts, especially the romantics and 20^th century avant-garde, both here and throughout the book, his title for chapter eight and his emphasis on “contingency”–what lies next to–are particularly instructive. That is, the chapter title situates “cultural history and aesthetics” in proximity, or in conversation, not in dialectical opposition or hierarchical form. Here we might well return to Liu’s attention to the kind of movement he values early in his discussion of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which allies the poetic and montage (13). The move is nonlinear but relational, or to put this another way, both within and outside of a history. In many ways, Liu’s discussion is reminiscent of assorted proponents of montage as a new form of language–or particularly, as in the case of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, a new model for writing history.¹ As James Williams notes, Godard sees montage (in cinematic and video form) as offering “a return to a moment before the order of linguistic and cinematic syntax has taken over and words and images have lost their immediacy, freedom, and innocence” (313). Godard’s epic series Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998) explicitly reasserts the “promise” of cinema and more specifically, of montage, to envision a more ethical world. This failed mission or “promise” is then reconfigured by Godard for video and digital media contexts with an intricately layered, collage like form that flows effortlessly between historical and cinematic epochs with a dazzling interweaving of text, image, sound, music, and spoken word collected from across a diverse spectrum of the arts and culture. Alifeleti Brown suggests in the journal Senses of Cinema that Godard’s Histoire(s) can be seen as pioneering model of remix/sampling culture as the work is driven exclusively by quotation, certainly testing the limits of copyright, while at the same time making no claims for rights for Histoire(s). A rich array of related experimental creative and critical efforts might then be sketched, which share and/or exceed the terrain mapped out by Godard’s montage: for example, Gregory Ulmer’s extensive work on electronic/digital fluency or “electracy“; Critical Art Ensemble’s assorted activism/artistic interventions and especially their “Utopian Plagiarism” in The Electronic Disturbance; Eduardo Navas’s history of “Remix“; and McKenzie Wark’s “Hacker Manifesto,” to note but a few.² All of these works situate their effort in a dynamic interplay between the clearly “contingent” areas of aesthetics and history, and all have ethical/political objectives.
 
I would like to close by noting that, in my experience, montage can play a strategic part when students use it to learn to make compelling and coherent arguments by editing together materials that often skip or zigzag across disciplinary terrains. Interdisciplinary translation, as we have seen through Liu’s investigations, forces reconsideration of received knowledge, but the rhetoric of “montage” can helps us to envision connections, to discern what is random and what is “contingent” (i.e., to see a field of relationships), and finally allows us to make ethical choices. Montage may at different times be called the “poetic” or a “remix”; it is a powerful method that may lead us out of the “cool” as Liu defines it and back to the “human” in its most open-ended sense of the term.
 

James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) participates in an underacknowledged yet widespread contemporary resuscitation of Neoplatonism. In the Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), Plato introduces the concept of the demiurge: “Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence . . . a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related” (29-30). Pandora, the distant, color-saturated moon on which most of Avatar‘s action takes place, is precisely such a world. The Egyptian-Roman philosopher Plotinus (c. 204-270 CE), influenced by Plato, identifies the demiurge as the nous, the divine mind–a universal One containing neither division nor distinction. Unlike the orthodox Christian belief expressed in the concept of ex nihilo, that a deliberative and thoughtful God created the universe out of nothing, Plotinus understands the cosmos as emanating ex deo (out of God), and, therefore, that the unfolding of the cosmos is a consequence of the existence of the One and a confirmation of its absolute transcendence. Plotinus’s concept of World Soul synthesizes these beliefs. While Avatar does not reference Neoplatonism directly, for Pandora’s humanoid inhabitants, the Na’vi, all Pandoran life, their own included, is organized through the power of Eywa. Eywa is, as the film’s narrative makes explicit, the indivisible “mother” who emanates from and is the crystallization of Pandora itself. She safeguards that world’s “balance of life.”
 
We might expect critics on the right to denounce the film’s “soft-headed environmentalism” and identify Avatar as a product of “Hollywood’s long history of anti-military sloganeering”, as well as scorning the film as pagan, emblematic of a “Godless Hollywood” that “ignores, laughs at or disrespects religion” (Goldstein). Vatican Radio pronounced the film “a wink towards the pseudo-doctrines which have made ecology the religion of the millennium” (Squires). Patrick Goldstein suggests that “moviegoers are far more comfortable with a fuzzy, inspirational form of pantheism like ‘Avatar’ than they are with an openly biblical message” (Goldstein). While moviegoers cannot be so conveniently lumped together, the ideas depicted in the film that contribute to its “fuzzy . . . pantheism” help explain Avatar‘s enormous appeal.
 
Now, to write within the academy about any contemporary influence of the Neoplatonic beliefs expressed in the concept of World Soul outside of philosophy or religious studies is not a common undertaking. The concept’s explicit metaphysical orientation, its inherent forms of magical thinking, are traditionally seen as largely opposing the foundations of empiricism, rationalism, dualism and materiality that inform Western academic thought. To examine Avatar as indicative of a wider popular resurgence of such metaphysical beliefs, however, does not mean that one must hold such beliefs.¹ Nevertheless, Avatar‘s core politics are animated by its depiction of an idealized future society predicated on a carbon-based, biological network of networks operationalized through the metaphysical logic of World Soul. Avatar‘s future world, where the precepts of World Soul appear to have materialized through a fusion of a religious calling with those of networked sentience, appeals to contemporary U.S. society, which is both increasingly networked and professes a high degree of religious faith. Moreover, the film operates within a culture whose political economy is in part based on the technology that feeds into building the networked world that, in a virtuous circle, we are told as users we ought to desire. The fetishization of new digital technologies, and of the new more generally, plays a role here, yet in complementary or accretive fashion, so too do the immersive 3D techniques that Cameron applies to Hollywood filmmaking. 3D allows audiences greater experientially-induced identification with the onscreen spectacle, and the film’s coupling of technological affectivity with its genre hybridity of fantasy and science fiction works synergistically to propose to audiences that the fantastical “magical empiricism” on offer might actually come to pass. In short, the affect of the visual technology itself helps validate the potential that the Neoplatonic ideals on display can be actualized.
 
Writing for Salon, Scott Mendelson calls the film “a staggering achievement in visual effects and 3D technology” (Mendelson). Technology is also the star of Andrew Leonard’s Salon review: “‘Avatar’ is a film that people want to see, because, quite simply, the 3D special effects used to create the astonishingly beautiful alien world of Pandora are, ahem, out of this world.” For the New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis, “‘Avatar’ shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own” (Dargis). “Amateur” reviewers on sites such as imdb.com variously assert that the film’s 3D effects work to include spectators in the cinematic experience in ways not before experienced. Computer generated (CG) animation allows Cameron to create what many consider a new cinematic spectacle. For many commentators, technology is Avatar‘s implicit hero.
 
While Avatar has become the poster child for the much anticipated onslaught of 3D entertainment devices, I nonetheless find it odd but telling, given the culture’s ongoing fascination with networks and the information technologies upon which they rely, that the issue of the connections between networks and the world of spirit explicitly raised in the film’s narrative has been all but ignored by reviewers. In a Facebook review, science fiction author Samuel Delany does acknowledge that “the rhysomatic [sic] wholeness of the alien world is suggested several times,” but he is more concerned to argue that the film fails ethically due to its aesthetic incoherence. Chasm-wide plot holes, Delaney suggests, inhibit viewers from connecting the dots in ways that Cameron might have wished. What viewers are left with are the haptic sensations delivered through CG and 3D effects (Delany). Yet the “rhysomatic wholeness” noted by Delaney–a wholeness manifesting through a wetware- or carbon-based future world network–lies at the core of the film’s oddly nostalgic appeal: for two hours and forty-two minutes, spectators experience fluttering on the edges of a collective post-Hive Mind fantasy: an inverted prelapsarian vision of the individual as a networked empath who is also already part of the tree of knowledge. Experientially, then, the film’s outstanding special effects work synergistically with its depiction of the Na’vi as a pre-Cartesian society, a 3D global village literally in touch and connected with the wider sentient world they inhabit.
 
As the film’s narrative unfolds, the Na’vi’s long queues of braided hair are revealed as neural links able to mesh with other Na’vi as well as with Pandora’s other sentient creatures, trees included, which also possess similar biologically-constituted, USB-like connective links. The Na’vi are more than “noble savages”: while conducting field experiments on the root system of one of Pandora’s giant trees, scientist Grace Augustine (Signourney Weaver), head of the corporate research unit responsible for developing avatar bodies that replicate the Na’vi, explains to her associates the power of the rhizomatic system that undergirds the “sacred” Hometree around which the Na’vi organize their existence. In Cameron’s screenplay, copyrighted in 2007 following a decade’s work, Augustine’s announcement occurs more than halfway through the film as part of an argument inside the corporation’s base of operations. In the film release, however, the revelation is depicted at the tree itself and occurs much earlier. This suggests a heightened comprehension by the filmmakers that Avatar‘s plot would cohere better if the idea that the Na’vi constitute a biological networked society were communicated earlier on. The key parts of Augustine’s dialog are as follows:
 

I’m not talking about pagan voodoo here–I’m talking about something real and measureable in the biology of the forest. . . . What we think we know–is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora . . . That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network–a global network. And the Na’vi can access it–they can upload and download data-memories . . . . The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground–it’s all around us. The Na’vi know that, and they’re fighting to defend it.²

The scene makes clear that the Na’vi form part of a sentient planetary whole–a network linked not through wires or Wi-Fi but through carbon-based forms of wetware. The entire network constitutes a biological life form. It is here that the film most directly reveals itself as participating in a resurgence of Neoplatonic thought reformulated to concord with what Manuel Castells terms “the rise of the network society” and the concomitant rise of real virtuality. The utopian suggestion is that the Na’vi have evolved biologically in ways that humans have not. Their network, while vulnerable to Earthly fire power, is vastly superior as a form of planetary intelligence to anything conceived by the human intelligence of Pandora’s marauding colonialists. Those humans in the film with whom the narrative asks us to identify are open to understanding the Na’vi as part of a global network within which each component constitutes a biological interface. As such, the Na’vi are allegorical, a figural device that serves to simulate the possible (and therefore, the desirable). By depicting the Na’vi in this way, the film hints at the seductive powers potentially available to beings of all kinds able to move beyond ideologies of overly atomistic individualism so as to see the world as One.

 
The genealogy of Neoplatonic influence on Idealist expectations for transcendence through electronic and, more recently, digital technologies is lengthy. The Web and services such as Google offer a contemporary vision of the world’s intelligence as a single, organized network. Earlier Neoplatonically-inflected networked visions include H.G. Wells’s 1938 prophesy of a World Brain, Teilhard de Chardin’s 1950s utopian proposal for an electronic noosphere (1964), Kevin Kelly’s aforementioned Hive Mind that reduces each individual human to a “dumb terminal” until connected to electronic networks (1994), and Pierre Lévy’s concept of the electronic hyperbody (1997). What distinguishes Avatar‘s future vision of a Neoplatonic World Soul from these earlier proposals is that it can depict the actualization of a networked intelligence through an evolved collectivity of embodied agents, humanoid and otherwise, who retain individuality yet are always collectively conjoined to Eywa, the earth Mother. In this way, Pandora’s world of empathetic networked individualism is a hybrid of Neoplatonism’s World Soul and of Cartesianism’s mind-body dualism. This is one strong reason why the film resonates so powerfully with contemporary audiences increasingly directed to understand themselves primarily as individuals yet also as monads networked through information technologies.

There are indisputable watershed years in hip-hop history. 1979, of course, is the year Fatback Band and The Sugarhill Gang released rap’s first singles. In 1984, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons found Def Jam in an NYU dorm; the label would define the sound of hip-hop throughout the 1980s. In 1986, Run DMC signed a million-dollar endorsement deal with Adidas, an early instance of the relationship between hip-hop, fashion, and branding. Yo! MTV Raps debuted in 1988, prompting a more sophisticated approach to the video format; meanwhile, at Harvard, juniors David Mays and Jon Shecter “pooled two hundred dollars to put together a one-page hip-hop music tipsheet which they grandly named The Source” (Chang 410). By the 1990s, that small zine would become the “the bible of hip-hop music, culture, & politics.”¹
 
1994 is another watershed year–arguably the most important of all. By then, the gangsta rap genre had started to exhaust itself, inadvertently descending into cliché-ridden self-parody. (Tamra Davis’s 1993 film CB4, starring Chris Rock, captures this decline perfectly.) The dominance of the West Coast’s musical aesthetic, known as “G-Funk,” began to dim in the smoky afterglow of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. In February and May of that year, the Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer Protection, and Competitiveness held two congressional hearings on “Music, Lyrics, and Commerce,” focusing on gangsta rap’s violent imagery, misogyny, and homophobia.² That year, Wesleyan University Press published the first academic monograph on rap and hip-hop, Tricia Rose’s canonical Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
 
Many fans view 1994 as the last gasp of creative breath before media-conglomerates put hip-hop aesthetics on life support. In part, this view is nothing more than hip-hop pastoralism; but 1994 was, in fact, an especially fecund moment in terms of musical production, with the release of several landmark albums: The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Common’s Resurrection, Outkast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Scarface’s The Diary, Organized Konfusion’s Stress: Extinction Agenda, Method Man’s Tical, The Roots’s From the Ground Up EP, and Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang.³ But no album from that year has received as much attention, then or now, as Nas’s Illmatic. It transformed the twenty-one-year-old MC from Queensbridge, New York–who once famously declared that he “went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus” (Main Source, “Live at the Barbeque”)–into a savior figure.⁴ Today, the aura that surrounds both him and the album persists.
 
Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a collection of scholarly essays and historical documents. Given the high volume of books published every year on hip-hop music and culture, it’s surprising that Born to Use Mics is the first book of its kind, one dedicated to a single epoch-defining record. In his introduction, Daulatzai explains that the book’s primary aim is to demonstrate why and how Illmatic is still “relevant” fifteen years after its release (3)–that is, relevant both to hip-hop’s past and future as well as to race relations in America. There are other similarly worthy albums, explains Daulatzai, such as Boogie Down Production’s Criminal Minded and Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted (3). But he writes that there’s “something” ineffable about Illmatic that makes it different (3).
 
The table of contents is divided into two “sides,” “40^th Side North” and “41^st Side South.” (The street names refer to the location of the Queensbridge House Projects.) The paratextual conceit reproduces the A-side/ B-side format of the album’s 12-inch pressing. Each contributor is assigned a single track to analyze. Some essayists use the assigned recordings as a jumping-off point for extended riffs on race, power, gender, and politics. Others insist on more localized readings–for example, Adilifu Nama’s “It Was Signified: ‘The Genesis’” posits that samples from the early hip-hop film Wildstyle (1983) provide the interpretive key to the album. The contributors cast Nas in a variety of roles: he’s a “black public intellectual” (97), a “lyrical ethnograph[er]” (181), a metaphysician (40, 251), and a “poet” (196).
 
Born to Use Mics concludes with a wonderfully edited section titled “Remixes.” It includes interviews, reviews, and personal reminiscences that historicize the album. (It’s comparable to the “Contexts” section one finds in Norton Critical Editions.) For example, “Remixes” reprints the infamous “5 Mic” review from The Source magazine, which is notoriously difficult to come by. Ultimately, the “Remixes” section situates Illmatic in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the mood of the age” (Bourdieu 32), while also introducing a decidedly less academic tone into the overall discussion.
 
The strongest essays in the collection make a concerted effort to attend to the album’s historical and formal particulars. Marc Lamont Hill’s “Critical Pedagogy at Halftime” argues that Nas’s “Halftime,” the first song recorded for the album, signifies the MC’s “first full-fledged foray into the world of black public intellectuals . . . Nas performs the most critical function of the public intellectual: linking a rigorous engagement with the life of the mind to an equally rigorous engagement with the public and its problems” (98). As a black public intellectual, Nas relocates “previously overlooked stories from the margins to the center of public consciousness,” and thus has as much in common with thinkers like Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Anthony Neal, and Cornel West as he does with rappers like Kool G. Rap, Mobb Deep, and Foxy Brown (108). In addition, Nas’s dialectical performance as a black public intellectual allows him to bind “two allegedly irreconcilable camps within the hip-hop community” (98): the conscious and commercial, or underground and popular. The former is associated with original hip-hop values and formal innovation; the latter is associated with cultural industry imperatives and aesthetic compromise. Nas traverses these market-driven designations and throws into relief the values symbolically attached to each. In other words, for Hill, one lesson to be gleaned from Illmatic is that we must rethink the “division of labor” in rap (98), a division that has stunted the music’s progress.
 
Ironically enough, Hill’s essay is also important because it’s one of the few to uphold the black public intellectual tradition insofar as it dares to introduce a dissenting opinion about Nas into the book. Hill offers two critiques: first, that Nas paints “romantic, or at least uncritical, portraits of Africa,” which suggest a lack of knowledge about the continent (111); second, that Nas reproduces the “male-centered political agendas” that have historically dominated hip-hop discourse (112).
 
Michael Eric Dyson’s “‘One Love,’ Two Brothers, Three Verses” considers how Nas’s “One Love” flips hip-hop’s carceral canon on its head. Rather than rapping about time in prison, Nas instead pens three missives to incarcerated friends, “offering them not a way out but at least a view outside the prison walls that confine them” (133), a view that includes “shifting allegiances, shattered affections, and sustaining alliances” (135). As is typical of the epistolary tradition, Nas’s lyrics are infused with a colloquial ease and emotional intimacy only possible between close friends. According to Dyson, the epistle enables Nas to articulate a theme of brotherhood: “By acting as his brothers’ keeper, their eyes and ears, their scribe and conscience, Nas generates a holistic vision of black brotherhood that reflects the goodness and potential of one man reflected in the eyes of the other, despite the prevalence of negative circumstances” (138). Stylistically, Dyson’s essay pulls off a delicate but important balancing act, moving between personal narrative (“When I first heard Nas’s ‘One Love’ . . . I thought immediately of my brother Everett, who is serving a life sentence for a murder” [129]), analysis of the prison industry (“During the 1980s and 1990s, state spending for corrections grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education” [130]), and a close reading of Nas’s lyrics, which “[marry] vernacular and formal poetic devices” (133). By moving between subjective and objective modes of analysis, the essay re-enacts the central formal dynamic at work in Nas’s “One Love.”
 
Throughout Born to Use Mics, the public housing development of Queensbridge is repeatedly alluded to in passing, but only Eddie S. Glaude Jr. maps the place and its meanings. In “‘Represent,’ Queensbridge, and the Art of Living,” Glaude Jr. reads Nas against the Queensbridge Housing Projects, “the largest low-income housing development in [New York City], with 3,142 apartments” (180). Glaude argues that the everyday violence Nas witnessed in the Queensbridge Housing Projects as a young man shaped, at least in part, a creative disposition that tends toward “lyrical ethnography.” As such, Nas’s language is a window into a place that’s ignored or willfully deserted by institutions like the New York Housing Authority.⁵ On the other hand, Glaude also emphasizes that Nas’s lyrics offer more than just faithful mimesis. Rather, Nas’s lyrics are instances of political “self-fashioning” and “making oneself present” (192). Nas depends on aesthetic approach to everyday life in order to survive, transcend, and transform Queensbridge’s horrors.
 
Not all the essays are as compelling as those by Hill, Dyson, and Glaude Jr. One persistent problem is that several contributors want to confer upon Nas the status of rap’s premier MC, the charismatic genius who stands head and shoulders above the rest. This uncritical desire is manifest in especially purple passages of praise and oddball evaluative analogies. Imani Perry writes that Nas’s “rhymes hit you like heroin, and they freeze listeners like the crystals in the nostril of the user” (“‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’: A Story of Lyrical Transcendence,” 197); Daulatzai compares Illmatic to The Battle of Algiers and later describes Nas’s imagery as “black dadaist” (“A Rebel to America: ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ After the Towers Fell,” 57); Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. describes the album’s music as “immaculately, eclectically, even delicately produced, and rich in layered textures and colors: a hip-hop version of Miles Davis’s signatures work, Kind of Blue (1959), if there ever was one” (“Time is Illmatic: A Song for My Father, A Letter to My Son,” 62); and Gregory Tate says that “Nas’s work exudes the ephemeral, fugitive resonance of trace memory-conjuring hardened lozenges of a ritual-habitual space time and chaos already vanished into thin air” (“An Elegy for Illmatic,” 237). This type of language is counterproductive; it works to further mystify rather than clarify what’s going on with Illmatic.
 
Some essayists implicitly reject the book’s conceit–that is, they fail to address the assigned track. In “‘Memory Lane’: On Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Fathers,” Mark Anthony Neal, an otherwise excellent cultural critic, only ostensibly writes about Nas’s “Memory Lane.” His essay, however, is a personal reflection on how the archive of black music audibly mediates father-son relationships that are otherwise marked by silence. As Neal puts it, “via sampling hip-hop has long occasioned opportunities for intergenerational conversation and intervention” (124). Kyra D. Gaunt’s “‘One Time 4 Your Mind’: Embedding Nas and Hip-Hop into a Gendered State of Mind” argues that Nas “is a perfect candidate for exploring gender issues within hip-hop” because “he has performed different manifestations of black masculinity and patriarchal dominance” (154). In each case, Nas’s songs are instrumentalized in service of persuasive arguments–but arguments that, to be frank, have little to do with Nas or Illmatic specifically. They could be made about any number of artists or albums.
 
If Born to Use Mics occasionally drifts away from Illmatic, its final section of reviews, interviews, and personal reminiscences redresses the situation, swinging the focus back to questions of production, consumption, and distribution. Especially useful is Jon Shecter’s “The Second Coming” (from the April 1994 issue of The Source). It presents interview excerpts from the rappers, producers, and executive producers involved in the recording process: Large Professor, MC Serch, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S., Faith Newman, and, of course, Nas. It includes Nas’s description of his first attempts at being an MC: “The first time I grabbed the mic was at my man Will’s house–bless the dead. He lived right upstairs from me on the sixth floor. . . . We used to rhyme on ‘White Lines’ and that old shit. Then later on, he bought equipment, like turntables, fader, we was makin’ tapes like that” (214). Other excellent moments in the piece include one in which Larger Professor and DJ Premier say how excited they were by Nas’s first recorded appearance on Main Source’s 1991 recording “Live at the Barbeque.” And Illmatic‘s executive producer MC Serch explains the difficulty he encounters finding a label home for Nas: “I took [the demo] to Russell [Simmons] first, Russell said it sounded like G Rap, he wasn’t wit’ it” (216). These tidbits of information are instructive: they demystify the eschatological aura around Illmatic and ground the album in a series of strategic actions by various agents in the field of hip-hop.
 
“Remixes” also includes “Born Alone, Die Alone,” an illuminating personal essay by writer and filmmaker Dream Hampton. Hampton’s essay posits Nas’s Illmatic as an artistic common ground between otherwise aggressively antagonistic West Coast / East Coast factions embodied by Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., respectively.
 
In 1994, Hampton was working as a journalist for The Source. For six months, she covered three court cases involving Tupac. During that period Hampton became friendly with Shakur. While staying in Los Angeles, where one of Shakur’s trials was taking place, Hampton got an advance-copy of Illmatic. She immediately dubs a cassette version for Tupac, who “was an instant convert” (243). The next day Tupac “arrived in his assigned courtroom blasting Illmatic so loudly that the bailiff yelled at him to turn it off before the judge took his seat on the bench” (243). Hampton subtly proposes that Nas’s lyrics on Illmatic inspired Tupac’s “first important album,” Me Against the World, recorded in 1994 (243).
 
Hampton tells another story, this one related to the Notorious B.I.G. Prior to relocating to L.A. for the Tupac trials, Hampton lived in New York. There, she got a copy of an Illmatic bootleg: “[I] seem to remember,” says Hampton, “passing dubs back and forth to my neighbor Biggie” (242; the two lived near each other in Bed-Stuy.) This would have been sometime in 1993, as Biggie recorded his debut album Ready to Die. This fact about the bootleg tape sheds new light on the call-and-response relationship between the two MCs. For example, in “Represent,” Nas says: “Somehow the rap game reminds me of the crack game, / Used to sport Bally’s and Gazelle’s with black frames . . .” The references to “Gazelle” sunglasses and the “rap game” / “crack game” equivalence are reiterated a year later in the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Things Done Changed”:
 

Remember back in the days, when niggaz had waves
Gazelle shades, and corn braids
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If I wasn’t in the rap game,
I’d probably have a key knee deep in the crack game . . .

Nas via Hampton is a key agent who alters the making of seminal albums by both Tupac and Biggie.

 
Hampton’s recollections shed light on how hip-hop is produced and consumed. First, Hampton’s narrative turns on an empowering use of technology: she “dubs” cassette copies of Illmatic. The circulation of cassette dubs is analogous to today’s digital file-sharing and mix-tape culture. Hampton’s story demonstrates how hip-hop culture has always transformed technology, putting it to creative use.⁶ Second, Hampton is one of three women integral to Illmatic‘s history. She joins Faith Newman, one of the album’s executive producers, and “Shortie,” the writer who awarded Illmatic the “5 Mic” review. They demonstrate the active roles women play in hip-hop and offer a useful counter-argument to Kyra Gaunt’s aforementioned feminist critique of Illmatic. That Hampton, Newman, and Shortie are only present in the book’s final section is indicative of the kinds of material knowledge absent, at times, from the book’s first half. A more material approach to hip-hop would enrich the solid scholarship.
 
At times, Born to Use Mics seems overeager in its attempt to make Illmatic “relevant,” in the process ironically rendering the album, or rather the experience of listening to the album, irrelevant. However, on the whole, the book demonstrates how a single record can yield and absorb richly diverse readings from across the disciplines. In his introduction, Daulatzai indicates that Born to Use Mics is the first in a proposed series of books dedicated to examining individual rap albums. This means that the next few years may be an exciting time for hip-hop scholarship, as other deserving albums from hip-hop’s near past may soon be reintroduced into our historical consciousness.
 

The first of two major new works collected in Carla Harryman’s new book of “literary nonfiction,” Adorno’s Noise, begins by eliding two otherwise remote passages from Minima Moralia: “If normality is death then regard for the object rather than communication is suspect” (Harryman 21). Equally spirited by Adorno’s negative dialectics–a Hegelian counter-pointillism meant to ameliorate the devaluation of subjective experience in Marxist and Freudian categories–and the aphoristic, indeed noisily lyric, style of Adorno’s prose, Harryman entertains the most dissolute promise of the opposite in “Regard for the Object Rather Than Communication Is Suspect”:
 

I wonder if it would be the case that if normality were not death, regard for the object would be purely an entailment of belief and communication would in turn become the object of thought. This may seem a bit mad as well as inappropriate content for a meaty essay. Bear with me for a little while. You and I will go on an excursion together and discover something along the way if we’re lucky. If we are not lucky, neither you nor I will be worse off than when we started. I can’t guarantee this but it is something I believe with enough confidence to proceed to the next sentence. The next sentence is not a death sentence.
 

(Adorno’s Noise 21)

The kind of improvisatory churning of antitheses that Adorno’s most radical utopian dictates–in particular his initially liberatory extension of Fourier’s critique of the commodification of gender norms–and the syllogistic force of dialectical thought are pitched as an aesthetic problem unresolved and yet still legible in the language of critical theory, the same problem that famously worried the question of writing poetry “after Auschwitz.” Modernity’s most rank expressions of positivist enlightenment genius pose the historical problem of “normality” in the wake of “defeated Germany,” to which, in Adorno’s assessment, only “a thoroughly unsatisfactory, contradictory answer, one that makes a mockery of both principle and practice” is available; is it not then barbarism to entertain the thought that “the fault lies in the question and not only in me” (56)?

 
With her alternative formulation, Harryman provides amply the “rigor and purity” of which Adorno speaks in his section on “Morality and style”:
 

A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result . . . . people know what they want because they know what other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existent patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. . . . Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate.
 

(Adorno 101)

Quite literally appropriating the question of what remains an appropriate response to modernity’s twilight produces an “essay” form that matches, in our time, the beleaguered “rigor” Adorno’s friend Thomas Mann spoke of when he wrote, “in order to read you, one should not be tired” (qtd in Jäger 128). It’s not enough to say that Adorno’s Noise is citational, and not exactly accurate to say Harryman writes like Adorno. While these observations may be “true,” it’s only because they are tautological, logical coincidences that define normative forms of exposition and “rigor.” Harryman’s writing is full of wry humor and critical attentiveness, by turns lapidary and bombastic, sometimes maddeningly self-conscious, but in a thoroughly motivated, astonishingly informed manner. When Harryman cites Adorno, it is transformative. She renders him elliptical. Adorno himself worried about this nascent quality which, in postmodern American poetics, becomes a virtue; the apology that forms a substantial amount of his dedicatory preface to Minima Moralia posits the aphoristic texture of what follows as a revision of Hegel’s proto-Fascistic denial of the “for-itself,” the defining trait of the aphorism’s pithy concision. Harryman’s book begins with a tiny treatise on the “cell of meaning,” the “in-itself” of language: “A might be an abbreviation for something inside itself, inside A,” which, “[o]nce exposed, [grows] out of proportion to the language that [has] ushered it into the brain of someone else and now it is mushrooming” (Adorno’s Noise 5).

 
How this disproportion takes shape makes Adorno’s Noise an important object lesson in literary form. That the poet’s primary skill or duty should be the imitation of life–of human action, perception, and emotion emulsified and expressed–is a notion that has only recently been challenged with sufficient seriousness. The same notion justified the expulsion of the poets from the good society in Book X of the Republic. Even in light of the Aristotelian correctives of catharsis and irony in the Poetics, the Platonic theory of imitation concerns dramatic representation, a context fully pertinent to Harryman’s oeuvre (she co-founded the San Francisco Poets Theater in 1979, an important venue for the development of West Coast language writing). Harryman has long written within and about the contamination of mimesis by capitalist ideology; it is both the leitmotif and the textual condition of her estimable body of writings, which duly violates the values of such market categories as genre, topic, and plot. Ostensibly a book of essays, Adorno’s Noise is distinctly imitative, not so much a sustained reflection of (or on) Adorno, but rather an example of poetic imitation that honors the distinction between influence and appropriation. This sort of imitation counts as something more than homage and just short of collaboration. Among signal works such as Robert Duncan’s Writing Writing: Stein Imitations and Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast, Adorno’s Noise points to a new imitative mode. In the latter, this point is rather obvious, because it is both discussed and itself imitated (being self-referential in the sense that the best essays are expository and demonstrative). Harryman’s book ponders how we acknowledge an author or text as a resource that is alive to us–as a catalytic agent and not an inert inheritance. The poetics of imitation arises with the fact that what sets such writing in motion also inhabits it; the writer suffers and celebrates an observer’s paradox, is “tinged with its prior potent identity” (Harryman, Adorno’s Noise 22).
 
At least since the Romantics’ recycling of etiological narratives and the high modernist “poem including history,” there have been two primary reactions to the ethical failure of mimetic impulses: taking refuge in a prosthetic voice, and denying the veracity of such idealized adequation. In either case, imitation has been out of favor in all but a few creative writing classrooms. Amazingly, Harryman shows no trace of such deadlock, borrowing freely and creating beyond the bland aspiration to originality. For her, and especially for this book, imitation might signify more than the fact of intertextuality. It seems to be a historical principle. Of course, history is a textual affair, a matter of record (the book’s epigraph is from Barrett Watten’s Bad History: “Fill the measurable time with indeterminate noise to show we are not happy about being figured in advance”). But where Schoenberg signified to Adorno the denouement of history’s grand march, Harryman reads Sun Ra. The “noise” she attributes to Adorno implies the contingencies of “being figured” between contemporary events and the mythos that would explain them. “Adorno was attracted to, in fact relied upon, mimesis,” Harryman writes in the last piece collected here; “Did I desire him even after he forgave me for faking the orgasm?” His hypothetical forgiveness would have stemmed, one gathers, from the “eleg[iac]” character of the orgasm, “an escape hatch in the negative dialectic” (Adorno’s Noise 179-180). Here, Harryman translates the disjunctive but wholly appropriate utterances of ecstasy homophonically–“low light lit little tick flea migrant sip pissy wit twill twill low will piano”–as if language itself were coming (Adorno’s Noise 178). At the same time she injects herself into the student protests of 1969 that radically upended Adorno’s status as a guru of leftist critique, even and especially his efforts to adjoin sexual liberation and the struggle to stop the oppression of women in the capitalist matrix:
 

If I had been among the students in Frankfurt, would I have opened up my leather jacket and showed him my breasts in a parodic manner, in solidarity with a leaflet that proclaimed “Adorno as an institution is dead?”
 
Direct socialization is structurally determined by the patriarchal or Oedipal family, so the gender politics of parody is hopeless if you want meaningful social change. In this story however the people live and Adorno dies. Yet I am convinced that I would have refused to think of Adorno or any individual as an institution and instead would have removed myself from the scene . . . I would have underscored my subject position as a mirror of the fragile component of the social sexual contract.
 

(Adorno’s Noise 179)

In this passage and in an earlier piece in the collection, “Just Noise,” we see a response to Adorno, who wrote in Minima Moralia, “Imagination is inflamed by women who lack, precisely, imagination . . . Their lives are construed as illustrations” (169). Doing history might entail a dizzying sonic representation of “Orgasms” under a heading culled, again from Minima Moralia, which, in context, reads, “Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. For its idea, sexual union, is the opposite of slackness, a blessed straining, just as that of all subjected labor is cursed” (Adorno 217). If Adorno as a hypothetical object of imitation comprises a character in her story, it’s difficult not to see the subject of imitation to be Harryman herself, the same character of her notorious send-up of the solipsistic seductions of artistic and entrepreneurial techne, “In the Mode of.” Masturbating in front of the modernist nude or making an exhibition of oneself, Harryman’s animation of the ostensible history of modernism’s caddy wake is exhilarating to read, even if it’s now somewhat familiar.

 
Adorno’s Noise sustains the humorous and nuanced gender-play of Harryman’s earlier work, though to sometimes disquieting extremes. For example, “Beware of Seeking out the Mighty” plays the syntactic template, “in writing a poem she is not writing a novel in writing a novel she is not writing an essay” and so on, far past the initial wit of the genitive negation (89); “Just Noise” is reprised with a tribute to Jackson Mac Low and linked to a quasi-concrete poem, “Inverse / Mirror,” and together they perhaps sacrifice too much in the recombinatory procedure, especially when what’s in question is the corruption of “the imagination” in the gendering of class politics (57-61). The cacophonous tone achieved in “Just Noise” is pursued elsewhere in the book with deft responsibility.
 
What’s more, the “noise” subverts the hierarchical distinction between form and genre–to the point of folding her own texts into the structure, including a passage from her unpublished play Performing Objects–and the table of contents alone is so intricate as to make terms like “chapter,” “section,” and “essay” redundant. One wants to fall back on that most inclusive category: poetry. The once reputed antithesis of noise, poetry recommends the figure of musicality that defines the ostensive lyricism of all we tend to hold under that rubric. Without rehearsing Adorno’s formidable theoretical investment in atonality, worrying his prudishness where jazz is concerned, nor collapsing into a similitude, there is something uncanny in that the lyricism of Adorno’s Noise serves as the basic thrust of many of the book’s arguments. Rob Halpern’s back-cover blurb claims that the book “reinvents ‘the essay as form.’” His point is not as tendentious as your typical blurb, as it illuminates the way the structural and generic contrivances of this book collude atonally. Writing of a very different kind of book by a similar, younger poet–Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News, a book whose reinvention of lyric’s means and materials he claims points “toward a radically different kind of negation,” perhaps toward a revision of Adorno’s dialectical schema, the tenets of which render lyric a form of barbarism–Halpern recuperates the notion that the lyric’s “fundamental is address to a world from a place within the world.” Barbaric or not, this is necessary “because neither of these [worlds] can be known or given in advance” (50). Hence the brand of and motivation for lyricism in Harryman’s book–one must qualify the observation that it is not a collection of lyric poems by sounding off the infinitely ostensible status of the essay, a word which means “try” and is more about drives and motives than about accomplishment and structure.
 
The “worlds” of Harryman and Adorno are mutually constitutive, so to address one from the other is to denude them with the very force of the language, to construct and deconstruct them –and this is the problem that gives the book thematic consistency. A truly breathtaking example is the long chapter, “It Lives in the Mimetic,” which takes up the work of Robert Smithson, Kenzaburo Oe, and William Blake. Smithson’s notion of “waning space” is first used to describe the structural peculiarities of Oe’s novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! What emerges from the aphoristic mini-essays that comprise it is an imitative cultivation of the claim Harryman made of her own work in one of her first books, Animal Instincts: “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it” (107). Eventually, what “lives in the mimetic,” the subject and its stories, lives not in a space dwindling under the weight of its denial, but in a “transitional space,” and marks the turning point of the chapter:
 

… even if writing is reading, to parrot another writer and word copiest, Kathy Acker. But the reader who writes may be a reader of things other than text. She locates her resources, which may also include a window and soft air. She abandons herself to a project and her projections. She conflates the potential legibility of a person with the potential legibility of written description.
 
I enter you here–as you and a fiction.
 

(Harryman, Adorno’s Noise 153)

This sort of conflation is introduced in the aforementioned “regard for the object,” marking the etiological opportunities and existential vulnerabilities that the poetic, the lyric, mimetic, and dramatic construct, in the right hands, derive. Harryman’s “resources” come by way of echolocation, or imitation reconceived as a fictional cosmos. “[S]trange planets beyond those orbiting our own are now available to ascription.” And since “the world is bigger than it was before,” those mild honorifics we ascribe to the worlds available as such, words, enter our purview (Adorno’s Noise 21).

 
The prose of “Regard for the Object” has such agility that the momentum eases the many discursive flights, such that an otherwise discontinuous set of asides exudes something somber, ethically fraught, and perfectly germane to the violence of globalization’s latest implosions. Here is where Harryman parts ways with Adorno; in Harryman’s hands, the negative dialectic reads as a series of virtual connections rather than the staid resolve its various articulations exude. The objects in question morph from starlight to a hand basket to a corpse, each being “reassigned by the action” of the writing, and also, of course, by the intimations imitated from a meshwork of sources, including the mind of the reader–one’s own regard. Just as Pluto’s identity as a planet was “eradicated by edicts,” so the “wishes” that transpire between the subject, subjects, and objects “glue up that which we are not” in as much as their communicative “resona[nce]” hides, in fact reverses, our physical contiguity beneath their discretions (Adorno’s Noise 22, 24-5). With allusions to Katrina and Iraq, Harryman discloses the finally cosmological ambition of the neoliberal idealist: “Extremists believe my heartbeat exists because the doctor has put her ear to the heart and your freedom exists because I have been profiled” (Adorno’s Noise 25). And in “Lesson,” a title even more cloying than any in Adorno’s book, neoconservative ambition is lampooned in a global battle royal that reads, though tongue in cheek, like The Rape of Lucretia in a cover version by Wolf Eyes. The noise is all that survives that or any analogy, for the mimes can be taken literally: “I give up you are going to be on top forever” in “the protective armor we now both share” (Adorno’s Noise 47-8).
 

In A Christianshavn Pub, Larsen Talks About His Undeservedly Settled Life

Rhododendrons

Dreaming Of Dragons (Mixed Media On Canvas)

There’s a ladder in her nylons
Where we can climb up to the stars
Join a queue of Borsalinos
As you bend over the bar
Tattoo on her muscle says
‘Beware, Behave, be mine’
She’ll eat them up for breakfast
One at a time

Anarcoma, Anarcoma, Anarcoma -Lyrics to “Anarcoma” by Marc Almond

 
During the 1970s in Spain, the comic series Anarcoma stands out as emblematic not only of the social and political reality of the day, but also of the openness and freedom that accompanied the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. It is a series that openly discusses taboo subjects such as homosexuality and gender identity, while at the same time questioning the myriad of issues tied to Spain’s transition to democracy, and especially the normative forces that had forced Spain into compliance with a rigid set of social expectations for so long. Anarcoma, created by the artist Nazario (Nazario Luque Vera), first appeared in serial form in El Víbora magazine in 1979, and later as a compilation, in 1981.¹
 
Born in Castilleja del Campo, Sevilla, Nazario grew up in an environment of Spanish traditionalism that soon made him realize that his creative destiny lay elsewhere, and so he made Barcelona his home in the early 1970s. The Catalan capital that welcomed the young artist was a city with a flourishing youth culture that was growing increasingly uneasy with the aging dictatorship.² Along with this culture came an active drive to break, bend, and refigure the norms that had oppressed Nazario and his contemporaries for so long. Nazario, in fact, calls himself a “militant homosexual,” and “militant” activists like Nazario were pushing to contribute to the rapid progress that Spain was attempting to make after years of oppression (“Disección” 55). Anarcoma emerges from this environment of radical change in Barcelona and in the rest of Spain. While various artists of this period fostered strong ties with the emergent gay political movement, Nazario viewed his artistic work itself as his contribution to militant activism. In an interview with the artist in Armand de Fluvià’s El movement gai a la clandestinitat del franquisme, Nazario says, “Jo en aquella època ja feia les meves històries d’Anarcoma, les meves històries de mariconeo. I pensava que amb això ja hi havia prou militància com perquè no em fes falta entrar en cap grup” ‘During that period I had already written my stories about Anarcoma, my queer stories. And I thought that with this there already was quite a lot of militancy so I felt it was unnecessary for me to join any group’ (76).³ The militant queerness of Anarcoma is precisely what distinguishes it and makes it such an important cultural text from this time period.
 
Anarcoma revolves around the life and adventures of the detective, Anarcoma. Dopico describes Nazario’s heroine as “un famoso travesti que pulula por las Ramblas barcelonesas, cuyas características físicas saltan a la vista y que se autodefine como ‘una maricona con tetas’” ‘a famous transvestite who mills around the Barcelona Ramblas, whose physical characteristics are obvious and who defines herself as ‘a faggot with tits” (393). Her actions and visual presentation can be interpreted as the ultimate symbol of the changes that were happening all over Spain.⁴
 
More than just a representation of the blurring of gender presentation or the reversal of established gender norms, however, Anarcoma is also a product of the Spanish comics traditions of the period in which it appears.⁵Anarcoma recalls the tradition of Spanish police-drama comics, like the Doctor Niebla series (see Fig. 1 below), populated with square jawed men and curvy women, which appeared beginning in the 1940s (Coma 425).⁶ Nazario describes Anarcoma in the introduction thus: “Es una mezcla, tanto en el físico como en su comportamiento, entre Lauren Bacall y Humfrey Bogart” ‘She is a mixture, as much in her appearance as in her behavior, between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart,’ a description that also connects the comic to a tradition of film noir detectives (Anarcoma 10). Still, despite the noir-inspired scenes and characters and themes of deception and intrigue, Anarcoma is far from a traditional comic (see Fig. 2 below).⁷Anarcoma simultaneously draws from these traditions and questions them, replicating in this sense the country’s attempt to reconcile its centuries-old culture with the need to transition into modernity. In effect, the comic queers the heteronorms which had, until this point, unwaveringly guided the nation. Juan Vicente Aliaga describes this process of questioning and queering: “Nazario ha recuperado, para el texto y la imagen, desde un punto de vista combativo y burlón, en un terreno imaginario preñado de realidad, los valores positivos de la feminización del varón y de la sexualidad despendolada, dándoles un toque queer avant la lettre” ‘Nazario has recovered, for the text and the image, from a combative and mocking point of view, in an imaginary land pregnant with reality, the positive values of the feminization of the male and of sexuality gone wild, giving them an avant la lettre queer touch’ (Aliaga and Cortes 68).
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Doctor Niebla (1952)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 2.

Anarcoma (17)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
Anarcoma and its original queer sensibility appear at a time when Spanish culture was attempting to emerge from the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship. A number of cultural texts of the time move specifically to forget the Franco period, and to re-create a sense of national cultural identity, in many cases by moving toward a kind of postmodern aesthetic that relies heavily on the primacy of images and eschews deep political discourse. Cristina Moreiras Menor highlights this trend:
 

Salir del ostracismo y el aislamiento que el antiguo régimen de Franco había impuesto, dejar de ser una comunidad ‘premoderna’, se convierte en prioridad fundamental y, a partir de ella, la construcción de una nueva imagen y de unas nuevas señas de identidad pasan por la destrucción, reconstrucción o incluso el desinterés aniquilador (como si no hubieran existido) de todos aquellos símbolos que se asocian con la vieja España.”
 

(65)

(Escaping from the ostracism and isolation that the former regime had imposed, ceasing to be a “pre-modern” community, became the fundamental priority and, from this, the construction of a new image and of new signs of identity go through the destruction of, reconstruction of or even an annihilating lack of interest in (as if it had never existed) all those symbols associated with old Spain.)

Anarcoma, we will see, takes the cultural and sexual expectations inherited from franquismo and queers them, resulting in a new set of images that can be associated with a democratic Spain.⁸

 
With its distinct visual representations, Anarcoma refigures gendered and sexual bodies while navigating real Barcelona spaces. This use of urban space rhetorically links the boundary crossing of Anarcoma as a fictional individual with the developments and changes within the gay community of Barcelona and of Spain at large, because the boundaries crossed by Anarcoma’s gender transgressions and those of supporting characters are linked to the real Barcelona spaces they inhabit. An analysis of the specific spaces and how they are refigured and tied to the fluid body of Anarcoma serves to reflect the development of gay identity in Spain.
 
Under the right-wing dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a large portion of the Spanish population had to remain “closeted,” in some sense of the word. Spaniards with more progressive or left leaning political views had to meet in secret; women who did not desire to be limited only to the domestic sphere had to carefully curtail any open expression of dissent, and Spanish gays and lesbians had to meet clandestinely, encode their correspondence to one another, and often endure life in a double closet.⁹ As the dictatorship of Franco entered its final years, Spanish people began to push back against the boundaries that had confined them for forty years. Beginning at first as a gradual transgression of these guiding norms, upon the death of Franco, as a nation, Spaniards began to emerge from the many closets where they had hidden themselves. This emergence on a number of fronts (political, social, cultural) was the beginning of what is widely known as the transición. During this period, Spain experienced an explosion of new production and thought that appeared as an attempt to reconcile its dark recent history with the promise of a new democratic country. With the increasing visibility of non-normative sexualities in Spain, and as a manifestation of this cultural and political transition, the figure of the transsexual became a popular, though controversial, metaphor for this period of Spanish history. A number of social and political thinkers who have examined the transición have pointed out that the figure of the transsexual can be rhetorically linked to it as a means of understanding social transformation in the period.¹⁰ “Such celebratory displays of cultural transvestism . . . were directly related to the euphoric sense of unlimited possibilities that came with ‘not having Franco’” (Vernon and Morris 7). The transsexual’s freedom from rigid sexual/gender models emblematizes the freedom of the country from a variety of rigid roles imposed earlier by Francoism. Cristina Moreiras Menor makes the connection between the presence of the transsexual in texts from this period and a move toward a more superficial, image based culture. She says, “En este sentido, ponen en escena una política de la transexualidad o travestismo donde lo que domina no es tanto la sexualidad como placer (jouissance) como la sexualidad como artificio y el juego de los signos sexuales” ‘In this sense, they stage a politics of transsexuality or travestism where what dominates is not as much sexuality as pleasure (jouissance) as sexuality as artifice and the game of sexual signs’ (78). The metaphor of the transsexual is not necessarily one that should be wielded universally, though. Many critics, including Garlinger and Pérez-Sánchez, have expressed “concern about uncritical endorsements of the drag metaphor of national identity” (Garlinger 367-68, Pérez-Sánchez 94). I argue, however, that the specific modes of queering of expectations of masculinity and femininity in Anarcoma themselves open up a space from which a new gay identity can emerge.¹¹ Built on this troubling of expectations, the freedom gained by this generation of Spanish gays and lesbians becomes less one tied to the specific political freedoms granted under democracy and more about the individual freedoms to more authentically express their sexuality.
 
The movement of transsexual and transvestite bodies through the evolving spaces of its cities, such as Barcelona, also highlights their role as focal points for the development of new identities. Barcelona during the transition was, in many ways, the birthplace of the gay community in Spain, as it was home to the first gatherings of gay and lesbian Spaniards, with a large number of transsexuals among them, who marched for the recognition of their rights.¹² While these now vocal groups disrupted the expected norms by taking to the public spaces of Barcelona, their openness resulted in a disruption of those discursive spaces. Public spaces had only recently been opened up to more freedom of expression, and in this specific expression (that of self-identification as gay) the concept of a gay community, both in more abstract cultural terms and very physical corporeal terms, began to form.
 
Other cultural and spatial factors figure into the development of gay identity. Barcelona is a city with strong ties to its traditional Catalan heritage, but this background was simultaneously rooted in the stricter traditions that had kept gay Spaniards in the closet, as well as a cultural tradition that allowed for the transition out of this closet. Barcelona and Cataluña as a whole had struggled with a desire for more cultural autonomy under the Franco regime, and with the end of the dictatorship, a more authentic expression of Catalan identity was possible. This revitalization of Catalan identity is reflected in the prized Catalan virtues of seny and arrauxment.¹³ The combination of common sense and tolerance of seny with the violent upheaval of arrauxment arguably provided Catalan cultural support for what would become the gay rights movement in Spain. The closeting forces that silenced Spanish gays and lesbians can be rhetorically linked to the oppression of Catalan cultural identity under the one-nation, one-culture rhetoric of the dictatorship, and so when free of these restraints, the resulting upheaval and demonstration of gays on the streets of Barcelona can be viewed as tied to a more open expression of Catalan cultural values.
 
In examining the city of Barcelona as a type of birthplace for gay identity in Spain, however, one must consider that the residents of the city are not necessarily Catalan, and that Catalan identity is not the only national/regional formation at play, and in fact many authors have thematized the migration of Andalusians and Murcians, known in Cataluña as Xarnegos, to the region. As one of the two largest cities in Spain, Barcelona would also have been a preferred destination for many closeted gay and lesbian Spaniards during and after the dictatorship. Often facing a greater degree of religious and social pressure due to their avowed or possibly closeted homosexuality, these men and women fled their home towns for more accepting environs. Before the death of Franco, their migration could have been couched in terms of artistic expression, as Barcelona had an active art scene, but the important point is that they came from all over, and they often brought their own distinct cultural heritages and expressions with them.¹⁴ This diverse mixture of backgrounds and experiences contributes not only to the types of cultural expression that came out of the transition in Barcelona, of which Anarcoma is one clear example, but also to the overall sense that the gay cultural identity that began to grow out of the demonstrations and marches was not entirely Catalan.
 
The development of queer identity both intersects with the city and changes it, just as it is itself changed by the city. It is important, then, to discuss Anarcoma, not only in the context of Spanish and Catalan cultures during the Franco and post-Franco periods, but also in relation to those concepts of gay and queer space developed by theorists such as Jon Binnie, David Bell, and others. Binnie has discussed the spatial element of sexual citizenship in the city,¹⁵ noting that “we put a lot of emphasis on the city as the prime site for the materialization of sexual identity, community and politics” (167). He distinguishes the work of Henning Bech, who argues that because of their “anonymity, publicity, and visibility . . . cities enable the performance of dissident sexualities” (Binnie 167). In other words, the city allows gays to be anonymous, but also to be visible. This combination makes identification of one another easier, for romantic encounters, for example, while also providing the anonymity and freedom to begin to understand one’s own identity. “(D)issident sexualities,” then, are clearly an “urban phenomenon, with cities as the centers of innovation and transgression” (Kaur Puar, Rushbrook and Schein 384).
 
Along with the ways that migration has impacted Catalan identity, particularly as it intersects with gay identity, it is also necessary to consider how the concept of migration affects more general theories of sexual citizenship and space. The flows from one place to another are not only interactions between spaces, but also forces that alter the spaces themselves. The forces that would drive a person to leave one place and migrate to another change the destination as well as the place left behind. As Bell and Binnie put it, “these flows interact with pre-existing urban forms and urban lives-these are not erased, but reworked” (1808). Migration contributes to the continual sense of becoming that is inherent in the development of an identity; it is a process that is not unidirectional or static, but continuous, as Larry Knopp and Michael Brown explain: “this continual process very often entails obvious material manifestations of diffusion, such as residential relocation, migration, communication via mass media, and the spread of resources such as money and cultural capital” (413).
 
These movements between places and the effects that they have on the development of queer sexual citizenship are not limited only to the spaces left behind and the spaces toward which the migrant moves in search of him or herself. The “in-between” is significant as well. Again Knopp and Brown provide relevant insights:
 

Furthermore, such spatially fractured subjectivities are constituted within as well as between scales and localities (for example, in movement between home, work, bars, clubs, coffee houses, tearooms or cottages, etc.). And, contrary to the experiences of many non-queer people, it appears that such searches lead us to subjectivities that are self-consciously multiply rooted…or rooted in movement itself, rather than in efforts to fix our subjectivities in only one key place.
 

(420)

The city, then, is a space that receives migrant sexual citizens and is changed by them while it aids them in their identity formation as individuals and as a community, and one where the movement between places is significant.¹⁶

 
Anarcoma represents precisely these connections between city spaces and the expression of queer identity in post-Franco Barcelona. Pablo Dopico describes Anarcoma as,
 

[u]n personaje emblemático que no dejó a ningún lector indiferente mientras paseaba con sus zapatos de tacón alto por las páginas de El Víbora en los primeros años de la década de los ochenta, reflejando y retratando el lado más canalla de las gentes y las calles de Barcelona. Reflejos de una subcultura urbana que mostraban un costumbrismo alternativo de la vida callejera.
 

(393)

([a]n emblematic character who left no reader indifferent while she walked with her high heeled shoes through the pages of El Víbora in the early years of the decade of the eighties, reflecting and depicting the more miserable side of the people and the streets of Barcelona. Reflections of an urban subculture that showed an alternative local culture of street life.)

Here Dopico links the character and body of Anarcoma not only to the streets of Barcelona, but also to the movement between places, and along those streets. The “alternative local culture of street life” mentioned here represents the city as rooted in past traditions, but also as changed by the nascent gay community and by the presence of Anarcoma as she moves through its streets.

The spaces that Anarcoma inhabits are not only general, anonymous spaces of sexual encounter between gays (clubs, bathhouses, cruising areas), but are also identifiable Barcelona spaces where Spanish gays could congregate openly and begin to develop a sense of connection and community identity. Dopico says, in discussing Anarcoma’s world, that:
 

Todos ellos conviven en una historia en la que la homosexualidad, lejos de presentarse como un gueto marginal, se convierte en la protagonista de la trama, en lo lógico y natural, con todas sus grandezas y miserias, reflejando sus gustos y costumbres cotidianas. Tras años de oprobio y condena, los homosexuales se sacudían la vergüenza de salir a la calle y buscaban un nuevo camino de libertad y normalidad rodeados de glamour y elegancia.
 

(395)

(They all coexist in a story where homosexuality, far from presenting itself as a marginal ghetto, is converted into the protagonist of the plot in the logical and natural way, with all of its grandeur and miseries, reflecting its everyday tastes and customs. After years of shame and condemnation, the homosexuals brushed away their embarrassment to go out into the streets and looked for a new path of liberty and normality surrounded by glamour and elegance.)

On those streets that Dopico links to the “new path of liberty and normality,” Anarcoma and her friends move from one iconic space to another, which they thereby mark as gay spaces or locations tied to the new sense of gay identity, although the comic also provides visual reminders of the resistances to these developments.

 
We see an example in one sequence in which Anarcoma and her friend Mimi are enjoying a social visit in a Barcelona bar/restaurant. The panel presents a fairly typical Barcelona scene (see Fig. 3 below). There are, however, certain elements that visually code the space as gay, or at least as a space welcoming to the newly visible gay community. To the left of Anarcoma and Mimi, one man has his arm around another muscular man, and to the right of them, a man flirts with the short order cook behind the bar. These ancillary characters in the panel are gays inhabiting a space coded as neutral or as a straight space, rather than gays who inhabit a space clearly marked as gay.¹⁷ Still, another part of the panel portrays their presence as part of a broader matrix of supportive spaces that would have contributed to the growth of gay identity. On the wall behind the group, a poster clearly advertises the “Día del Orgullo Gay” (“Gay Pride Day”).
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Anarcoma (29)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
In this world, created by presenting a series of distinct spaces on the page, Nazario chooses to set the scenes in historic bars that were frequented by the author and his contemporaries. This focus on the streets and the common gathering places of Barcelona’s gay community places primacy not only on the act of gathering itself, but also on the places in which they could and would gather. Panels depicting these spaces are often wide and show a number of people conversing with each other at once. From this frenetic display of activity, the reader gains a sense not only of social interactions in a bar setting, which are often associated with Spanish nightlife in general, but also of interactions that are queered by the people in the bar (gays, transsexuals, punks). The specific types of conversations they are having in the panel (discussing sex acts, conquests, etc.) also help to queer the space. The realistic representations of specific, named spaces of the Barcelona nightlife accompany the more generic spaces that Anarcoma visits, and which could be anywhere in the city (public bathrooms, drag cabarets, dark waterfront docks), thus creating an image both of the specific gay spaces of the city and of those anonymous ones which served a specific purpose for individuals in the developing community (cruising, nightlife, etc.).
 
In a text that sets its action in the changing world of the Catalan capital in the 1970s and early 1980s, the specific choice of referents to code the city as specifically Barcelona represents an inversion of what is ordinarily thought of as “monumental.” There are no landmark buildings or skylines, no “tourist” representations of the city. Instead, Nazario focuses on the streets. In fact, the only image of Barcelona that can be considered “iconic” is the Miró mosaic imbedded in the center of the Rambla, and it is a literal “landmark,” at street level to be looked down at instead of gazed up at, further underscoring the “life on the street” nature of Nazario’s adopted home town.
 
The ties between Barcelona in the text and the real city of the post-Franco period are not limited to its public social spaces. At times, Nazario also chooses to include historical people from his world who interact on the page with the fictional Anarcoma and her associates. Nazario’s friend Onliyú appears as the inventor of the mysterious machine that everyone in the story is searching for. Nazario’s boyfriend Alejandro attempts to seduce Anarcoma’s friend Jamfry, and Nazario himself appears in another panel, arm in arm with his friend Ocaña (see Fig. 4 below).¹⁸ These people link the text to the city and to the gay community that was in its developmental stages, due in large part to their involvement with the burgeoning gay community through their artistic and creative work. This inclusion further ties the freedoms of expression and congregation that Anarcoma and her fictional associates enjoy with the developing community of Barcelona and Spain.
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Anarcoma (42)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
While it is important to examine the specific spaces which Anarcoma and her fellow Barcelonans, both fictional and real, inhabit, “people on the move across spaces may also be key contributors to the sexual characterization of places” (Kaur Puar, Rushbrook and Schein 385-386). This movement between and across spaces is important in this context because of the emphasis Nazario puts on the streets and on street life in the text. Here the streets are a significant space of their own. Just as the text features life inside these bars and social hotspots, it also places significance on the life outside and in between them by showing activity going on through the window of panels set in the interior of a place, or by beginning a sequence from the street and looking through the front display window into the restaurant or bar. These are not mere establishing shots, as the specific activity going on outside the spaces (other transsexuals talking, gay couples walking hand in hand, etc.) contribute to the sense that this entire network of space is somehow new and different.
 
On the streets, Anarcoma and her fellow citizens move from place to place, but not free from interactions, glances, and conversations. In navigating the city, Anarcoma seeks out clues to the mystery as well as pleasure and sexual company. In this movement, she can be seen as what Dianne Chisholm calls a “cruising flâneur,” a refiguring of Benjamin’s city dweller, who in this modern, queer context, gravitates to erotic hotspots in her movement through urban spaces (46-47). She moves between these spaces, at times seemingly for the mere sake of moving, and while doing so, she frequently participates in cruising for a fleeting sexual encounter. This more seedy element of the street experience, done in the open and visible to all, is yet another hallmark of the new sexual freedom in Barcelona and in Spain.
 
This openness and freedom are not complete, however. The newfound freedoms of Spain after Franco were not suddenly widespread and easily accepted overnight, and in Anarcoma, there is a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty that pervades the text. This could be attributed to the film noir feel of the detective stories that inform it, but there are moments that textually tie Anarcoma to its historical moment and to the widespread uncertainty as to the future of the country. One such instance occurs in a panel chronicling Anarcoma and Mimi’s movement from one bar to the next. The friends are discussing part of the mystery she is trying to solve, and Mimi says, “Después de las cosas que han pasado…A mí me da mucho miedo” ‘After everything that has happened…It really scares me’ (Anarcoma 29). This statement would only be one of a number of plot-driving statements except for the way the panel is presented. As Anarcoma and Mimi walk toward the Bar Ramblas, foregrounded in ominous green shadows are what appear to be members of the Spanish secret police, complete with the requisite, threatening dark glasses and scowls. Their presence in this panel allows for a secondary reading of Mimi’s statement, now connected with the fear and uncertainty that faced the community at this historical moment.¹⁹ It is, in fact, this sense of fear that marked this period. Moreiras Menor points out that the period of the desencanto during which Anarcoma appears is characterized by “un sentimiento generalizado de miedo surgido por el estado de incertidumbre social, económica y política” ‘a generalized feeling of fear which arises from the state of social, economic, and political uncertainty’ (61). In this, and in many other ways, the comic is an historical text documenting the testing of the boundaries amidst a fear of a return to the rigidity of dictatorship, as in Fig. 5:²⁰
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Anarcoma (29)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
The meeting spots and streets of Barcelona in the pages of the comic provide the rhetorical space for the development of a sense of sexual citizenship on the part of gay and lesbian Spaniards in general, and are also directly linked to the figure of Anarcoma as she inhabits these spaces. Teresa Vilarós agrees that, despite the “rareza” or “strangeness” of Anarcoma, it is representative of the reality and the aesthetics of the period. She says
 

Y aunque no se puede extender al total de la población–ni siquiera a su mayoría–sí puede afirmarse sin embargo que fue este cuerpo ’emplumado’ y fluido,²¹ compuesto sobre todo de heroína, sangre y semen, el que dio voz, estilo y marca a un momento específico de la historia española reciente

(And although one cannot extend it to the total population–nor even to a majority of it–one can nevertheless assert that it was this ‘queer’ and fluid body, composed above all of heroine, blood, and semen, the one that gave voice, style, and a brand to a specific moment of recent Spanish history).
 

(183)

The spaces which Anarcoma inhabits are themselves significant in the ways they help question established norms. Anarcoma’s is a subculture of explicit, often violent sex, and within these spaces, a constant examination and reconstruction of gender norms occurs, not relying on the heteronormative model of gender expression, but instead creating a new one which foregrounds freedom of expression and sexuality as the most important forces in identity formation.²²

 
Anarcoma’s subjectivity is centered on her bodily presence, and the forces which cause the refiguring and recreating of Barcelona in the comic are also at work on the body of Anarcoma herself. Knopp and Brown tie agency to spatiality, saying: “A more queer way of conceptualizing these issues, we believe, involves thinking of ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ . . . as inextricably intertwined and inherently spatial” (412). This results in a new idea of the role of the body and of the visual presentation of gender as a foundational force for the establishment of gay identity. In Anarcoma, Nazario utilizes the visual medium of comics to question, refigure and ultimately queer the expected cultural gender norms through the character of Anarcoma herself. Anarcoma is a liminal figure who occupies simultaneously two different, gendered roles. An examination of the way Nazario presents the transsexual detective in the comic elucidates much about the way gender is presented in comics and how questions of gender and gender norms figure prominently in the nascent gay movement of Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A further analysis of the secondary characters with whom Anarcoma interacts also highlights this queering of the norms through the abstraction of coded images of gender.
 
Peter Brooks writes that “modern narratives appear to produce a semioticization of the body which is matched by a somatization of story: a claim that the body must be a source and a locus of meanings, and that stories cannot be told without making the body a prime vehicle of narrative significations” (xii). Anarcoma’s body is represented as loaded with meaning, a mixture between masculine and feminine without favoring one or the other. Nazario draws her in feminine clothing at all times, often in hypersexual tight skirts and fishnet stockings, but she is also coded masculine in the aggression with which she sets out to solve crime. While the traditional mainstream image of the transsexual is one of outward femininity that hides bodily maleness, Anarcoma does not attempt to hide her maleness, nor does she exclusively express exterior femininity. As the introduction says, she is “orgullosa de su respetable polla,” ‘proud of her sizeable cock,’ and in her sexual encounters is frequently the active partner (Anarcoma 10). In this way, Anarcoma not only presents a queer image, refusing to conform to one model of gender (masculinity or femininity), but she also queers what would have been the ubiquitous image of the transsexual in post Franco Spanish society. Nazario himself has described her, saying: “no es una Bibi Andersen que está ahí tratando de disimular, que todo el mundo sabe que fue hombre y que nadie sabe realmente si está operada o no está operada, funciona como mujer pero hay este misterio. En cambio en Anarcoma no había este misterio en absoluto nunca” ‘she is not a Bibi Andersen who is there trying to hide, who everyone knows was a man and that no one really knows if she is pre-operative or post-operative, functioning as a woman but with that mystery. Instead, in Anarcoma there was never this mystery’ (qtd. in Pérez del Solar 534).²³ She is neither completely male nor female, nor even traditionally transsexual. Anarcoma is truly queer, questioning identity and sexuality at a new level.²⁴ Anarcoma, then, exists as a kind of postmodern subject for whom exterior appearance and behavior are much more important than a deeper sense of self or identity.²⁵
 
The presence of Anarcoma and her role in establishing a new sense of queer cultural expression participates in a long tradition of narratives that deal with non-normative sexuality as it relates to Spanish identity. Gema Pérez-Sánchez has pointed out, for example, that in a number of texts that on one level attempt to recover queer expression, “the characterization of the male protagonists as victims is informed by the fear of being symbolically feminized, castrated, and possibly sodomized by fascism” (75). Coming out of the immediate post-Franco period, I would argue, Anarcoma wields a number of these fears as weapons, not in an exorcism of the “fear of feminization” that Pérez-Sánchez notes is present in related texts, but rather as useful tools in the recovery of agency over them: Anarcoma makes the choice to remain in a middle place between masculinity an femininity, she is an active and passive participant in sodomy, again choosing not to favor one over the other, exhibiting agency over the choice rather than fear, and, in a particularly graphic scene, she literally castrates one of her captors in an attempt to escape their clutches. With these active choices, Anarcoma exhibits control over her environment, and establishes a new model for the freedom of personal expression under democracy.
 
Anarcoma is a transsexual with an outwardly feminine appearance, but as Alberto Mira discusses, “Anarcoma sería un ejemplo de transgresión precisamente porque, a pesar de tener cierta apariencia femenina se comporta de manera viril” ‘Anarcoma would be an example of transgression precisely because, in spite of having a certain feminine appearance, she behaves in a manly way’ (438). It is this masculine behavior that most often marks Anarcoma’s masculinity. What cannot be ignored in the numerous panels showing our heroine engaging in a sex act, however, is the presence of her “sizeable cock.” It is, after all, her penis which distinguishes her from other, biological females in the comic. Her liminality as a character is due in large part to her insistence on remaining “no operada” ‘un-operated.’ Unlike many real-world transsexuals who are at varying points on a journey toward full transition, Nazario has Anarcoma choose to keep her penis, due in large part to the power it allows her to wield in a phallocentric society.²⁶
 
As Butler and others have well established, gender is a type of performance, and visuality is an important part of the process of the performance of gender. Butler writes, “Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (173). The fact that Anarcoma is shown displaying her penis at various times makes her penis part of Anarcoma’s gender performance. Hers is a fluctuating performance, however, changing depending on her needs and desires at that moment. While her breasts and women’s clothing represent one manifestation of gender, her display of her penis represents another, and at times both appear simultaneously, emphasizing the performativity of gender.²⁷ Her clothing too, although predominantly feminine in style, is occasionally coded visually as masculine. One particular item of clothing, the trench coat that appears to be the heroine’s favorite piece of outerwear, does this most successfully. In that it covers the outward displays of Anarcoma’s femininity and is a common clothing item for many men, this trench coat marks her as masculine, but it also helps produce the aura of the film noir detective to which Anarcoma owes much inspiration. That detective is exclusively male, so when our detective wears a trench coat, not only does it cover up her femaleness (she also tends to wear her hair up in a beret to further this outward performance of masculinity), but it also imbues her with the masculinity that is associated with the film noir detective.
 
Another way in which Anarcoma displays her gender performance of masculinity can be seen in a panel in which her sex robot, XM2, is first put under her control. He springs to attention, saying “¡A sus órdenes, mi jefe!” ‘At your command, sir!,’ thereby putting Anarcoma in the position of the male military officer waiting for the compliance of his soldiers. This masculinity is subverted by the visual representation of Anarcoma, with exposed breasts and high heeled boots, her hidden (for the time being) penis covered with undergarments. She can also be read here as a dominatrix who, although traditionally feminine, wields masculine power and control over her sexual partner; indeed the inversion of traditional gender and power roles forms a major part of the allure of this type of activity, as in Fig. 6:
 

 

 

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Fig. 6.

Anarcoma (44)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

It may well be that Anarcoma’s masculinity is the most dramatic of the two presentations, due in large part to her outward, feminine appearance, but that feminine appearance balances out the equation, holding Anarcoma firmly in the liminal space between masculinity and femininity.

 
Anarcoma is often visually coded as feminine. Just as her maleness is displayed openly, her femaleness is similarly made visible in the frequent times she appears topless in the comic. Anarcoma’s breasts do not take the form of stuffed bras or other fabricated illusions, but are bodily markers of her femaleness, and so in seeing them (and we do see them often) the reader is constantly reminded of this aspect of Anarcoma’s gender identity. This bodily marker of her femaleness serves not only to keep the visual representation of her gender identity fluid, but also to feature her breasts as a bodily site of social transgression. Mary Douglas discusses bodily boundaries and their ties to social boundaries:

The relation of head to feet, of brain and sexual organs, of mouth and anus are commonly treated so that they express the relevant patterns of hierarchy. Consequently I now advance the hypothesis that bodily control is an expression of social control–abandonment of bodily control in ritual responds to the requirements of a social experience which is being expressed. Furthermore, there is little prospect of successfully imposing bodily control without the corresponding social forms.
 

(70-71)

So the bodily control that Anarcoma exerts through the hormone injections she uses to gain her breasts is not only a crossing of her own personal boundaries but also a symbolic subversion of societal controls over her body.²⁸

Even when wearing that favorite, masculine trench coat of hers, Anarcoma is often topless underneath, ready to shed the outward marker of masculinity and display her femaleness proudly. Most frequently, though, it is her style of dress that is the primary component of her performance of femininity, since she is often drawn in skimpy skirts, knee-high, high-heeled boots and fishnet stockings. Out with her (also transsexual) friend, the two window-shop for high heels and look at dress displays in a store window (the act of window shopping in itself can be considered feminine). They are, in a sense, looking at the articles of their artifice, seeking out the tools that will help them succeed in their gender performance. At the end of their day of shopping, they stop in a salon, a locus for bodily control: Anarcoma’s friend gets her legs waxed. All of these events taking place in the space of three panels convey the two characters’ quest for femininity. As Butler would no doubt remind us, though, if transsexuals search for femininity, it does not mean that gender construction and performance are exclusive to them. All women (like all men) perform their gender in part through outward displays of clothing and bodily control, as in Fig. 7 below:
 

 

 

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Fig. 7.

Anarcoma (55)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
In another sequence, Anarcoma tries to get information out of a female associate of her nemesis, La Deisy. She takes advantage of the drunkenness of the woman to ply her for details regarding the location of a missing machine, and ultimately resorts to seducing the woman to further her quest. The scene is distinguished by the way it is presented visually. Despite the fact that the reader is well aware of Anarcoma’s sexual prowess and her “sizeable cock,” the sex between the two is visually coded as lesbian sex. They are first shown sitting fully clothed on the couch, conversing and flirting, and then in the following panel, La Deisy is shown lying down bare breasted while Anarcoma performs oral sex on her, while herself fully clothed. After the nakedness and the sex coded as either heterosexual or as sex between men that abounds in the comic, it is significant that Anarcoma is coded here as exclusively feminine, as lesbian. Perhaps it is an effort to resist traditional gender/sexual roles and avoid the expected sexual coupling of a male and a female, which might be the case if the detective were coded as more masculine here. Anarcoma does, after all, have no problem playing a more active, male coded sexual role when having sex with men. By resisting the more traditional expectations, and instead creating a panel that is coded as lesbian, Nazario maintains the tension that exists bodily in the character of Anarcoma and is reflected in her behavior.
 
Anarcoma ties the transgressive body to the changing culture and spaces of Spain. Her body is a “corporeal . . . mapping of the subject into a cultural system”; as a metaphor, Anarcoma’s fluid body comments on the norms that had constricted Spanish culture under Franco and on the forces that sought to move Spain away from its rigid past (Bukatman 49). In a nation that wanted to leave its troubled past behind, Nazario creates Anarcoma. She is an uncommon, unexpected heroine who refuses to leave the “past” of her body behind, and instead forges her own way, a new way created from within spaces that facilitate this act of creation and re-creation. The negotiations she makes throughout the text emblematize the transition which was occurring around her and her readers. The city she moves through, Barcelona, provides her with the freedom to create her own path and to carve out her own identity. Her life and adventures highlight the negotiations (of space, of regional and national identities, etc.) that the country as a whole was grappling with. However, just as Spain’s future was uncertain when Anarcoma first appeared, so the text leaves many of the questions it raises intentionally unanswered. The result of the continual negotiations, back and forth migrations, and incomplete formations in Anarcoma is a text that centers on a detective who, by the end of the story, rather than solve a mystery outright, instead leaves the reader questioning, among other things, such ideas as the visual markers of gender, gender roles, and the constructedness of gender itself.
 

Quotation marks ticked through the body of the text like sutures arched in stitches that will scar.
 
But if a scar is always a citation, are citations, themselves, always scars?
 

–Craig Dworkin, “Dure,” Strand (79)

A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.
 

–Sherrie Levine, “Statement” (1039)

“I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog,’” announces Nietzsche in a brilliantly magisterial pretense of having at last gained the upper hand . . . . In the isolation of pain, even the most uncompromising advocate of individualism might suddenly prefer a realm populated by companions.
 

–Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (11)

 
“All minds quote,” as the supremely quotable Ralph Waldo Emerson would have it–and yet not all minds quote alike at all times (“Quotation” 178). Pastiche, quotation, montage, and sampling have been taken as paradigmatic gestures of the contemporary period: of the postmodern, of the information age, or of the belated era of “the end of art.”¹ This essay explores quotation and citationality in the writing of poet-critic Craig Dworkin. Dworkin’s “Dure,” I argue, demonstrates that an appropriative, heavily quotational poetics can enact a process of therapeutic self-critique.² An ekphrastic prose poem about a Dürer self-portrait, “Dure” is a complex meditation on selfhood, the representation of pain, and the nature of linguistic appropriation. “Dure” operates by continually drawing attention to the discursive parameters by which we articulate pain. Roughly a third of “Dure” consists of direct quotation. In response to the postauthorial (and posthistorical) malaise of Barthes’s the “text is a tissue of quotations” (104), Dworkin offers a self-portrait in a tissue of quotations, enacting a writing cure, or a writing-through cure. Extensively quotational works are often associated with parody and satire–but such works, this essay suggests, can also mourn, as well as heal, by thematizing intersubjectivity, or in Scarry’s terms, by creating “a realm populated by companions” (11). Although Dworkin elsewhere advocates a poetics “of intellect rather than emotion” (“Introduction”), I suggest that “Dure” enacts something along the lines of a return to expressive autobiography, somewhat paradoxically by way of a poetics of citationality.
 
The term citationality, in the sense that I am using it here, is taken from Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (Butler derives it from Derrida’s critique of Searle). In updating the theory of performativity outlined in Gender Trouble, Butler argues that
 

The forming, crafting, bearing, circulation, signification of [the] sexed body will not be a set of actions performed in compliance with the law; on the contrary, they will be a set of actions mobilized by the law, the citational accumulation and dissimulation of the law. . . .
 
Performativity is thus not a singular “act,” for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical.
 

(12)

For Butler, to think of performativity as citational is “directly counter to any notion of a voluntarist subject who exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which she/he opposes” (15). Adapting Butler’s notion of citationality, I suggest that in “Dure” Dworkin blends citation and direct expression in order to negotiate “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (in Charles Olson’s influential formulation) (247). That subjectivity is citational is not necessarily a state of affairs to be lamented–rather, any informed self-analysis must take into account a subject who is both a product and a producer of a citational performativity. A scar, in other words, is not only the site of a wound, it is also a site (or a citation) of healing.

If Parse and “Legion” obliquely, but perhaps centrally, address the unrepresentability of pain, “Dure” goes further to represent the relation of the pain of others to the author’s own pain. “Dure,” like John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” is a self-portrait within a self-portrait. Whereas Ashbery chooses to reflect upon a well-known Parmigianino portrait, Dworkin chooses a Dürer portrait that is not only obscure, but lost. Like Klee’s Angelus Novus (owned by Walter Benjamin and made famous in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), the Dürer portrait was lost in the Second World War, and can now only be viewed as a grainy black and white photograph (see Fig. 1 below).⁶ The picture itself is, in a sense, a subject of traumatic experience. It cannot say for itself, “J’ai été perdu.” More importantly for Dworkin’s purposes, the back story of the picture has been lost. The intended audience (a physician?) of the portrait will never be known, nor will it ever be known what the figure in the portrait is pointing at (the spleen?).
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Albrecht Dürer, “Self-Portrait” ca. 1519.

 

 
“Dure” consists of 28 interconnected paragraph sections from which it is difficult to quote selectively. Each section is peppered with quotations which are cited in the “Sources” apparatus that follows the body of the text. As I am centrally interested in the poem’s structure and in its documentary apparatus, it is best to quote in full both the first section and the notes that correspond to it:
 

“–sb¹ 1. A crag, [now] obs.” A fragment (of course); a cinder (of slag). Or “shy, afraid.” This ender day. Rendered as: do to, admit them, to dare. Curative, tackle, tined. This remains, and bears, in India ink, under watercolor wash, over stains on unlaid paper: Do der gelb fleck ist und mit dem finger drawff dewt do ist mir we. Why write this? “Where the yellow spot is and where I am pointing with my finger, that is where it hurts.” Dead letter, tour, a dearth. Unsigned, accessioned with a circle stamped shield and key to the Bremen Kunstverein, the drawing has not been seen since the end of the second world war. As if it were the emblem of another legend: ubi manus, ibi dolor.
 

(Strand 75)

 

This passage presents a considerable array of critical puzzles. But before addressing those problems, here are the corresponding “Sources”:

 

“Crag” and “shy, afraid.” The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Volume XIV, 584. On fear as the subject of self portraiture, see Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Éditions de la Rèunion des musèes nationaux, 1990), Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Micahel [sic] Naas as Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1993): 70.
 
“Do der gelb fleck [where the yellow spot]….” Albrecht Dürer, drawing, 11.8 x 10.8 cm, 1519 [?]. Catalogued as Winkler 482. Formerly Kunsthalle Bremen.
 
Ubi manus ibi dolor. Inscription on bronze table-fountain statue of Venus, anonymous sculptor, 1520s. Formerly Nürnberg, now Museo Nazional, Florence. Compare with the proverbs ubi amor, ibi dolor, and ubi dolor, ibi digitus.
 

(Strand 103)

 

While these notes provide crucial information about the poem’s sources, they are far from conventional scholarly notes, and they may pose as many questions as they solve. To go back to the beginning: What does an obsolete meaning of the word “crag” have to do with this Dürer self-portrait? “Crag” is only one letter shy of the author’s first name: is he thus alerting us to his own shyness as a way of opening on to the scene of writing? Is the author himself a “fragment”? But why “[a] fragment (of course)”? This phrase is supposedly derived from the OED; consulting the OED, however, raises more questions. “Crag” did once have the variant spelling “Craig.” But among the many definitions of the noun form–including the expected “[a] steep of precipitous rock” as well as the perhaps not so expected “neck” or “lean scraggy person”–there is no “A fragment,” much less “A fragment (of course).” If that weren’t enough, the formulation “[now] obs.” would seem to be something of a redundancy or pleonasm, which I cannot find in the OED. Nor can I find a link between “a cinder (of slag)” and the word “crag.” And how can “shy, afraid” be conflated into a single definition? “This ender day,” which follows these fanciful dictionary definitions, at least can be traced to a source, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis from 1390. But “This ender day” is not in quotations.

 
Dworkin in fact reveals the source of most of his quotations: page 584 of volume XIV of the OED, on which we find the word “scar.” Dworkin conceals his meaning (or the source of his meaning) in plain sight. Like the Dürer portrait, the poem points to a scar whose origin has been obscured. In the poem’s first few lines, the reader is confronted with a range of overdetermined textual possibilities. Definition and etymology only seem to complicate matters. Is the subject of the poem its author’s scar or the scar of the Dürer self-portrait? It is (of course) both and neither. Consider the title of the poem (for which a note would be most helpful!): the OED records “dure” as an archaic noun meaning “hard” and as an archaic verb meaning “1. intr. To last, continue in existence. arch. 2. To persist, ‘hold out’ in action; to continue in a certain state, condition, or place. Obs. 3. To continue or extend onward in space. Obs. 4. trans. To sustain, undergo, bear (pain, opposition, etc); to endure. Obs.” Perhaps we are getting closer to the subject, or at least the titular subject, of the poem: this is a poem about the hardness of locating, enduring, and communicating pain.
 
The poem, moreover, “undertakes to represent itself” (17) in Foucault’s terms–the poem is the scar, at the same time that the poem acknowledges that it can never represent Dürer’s or the poet’s “actual” scar. Like Velazquez’s Las Meninas, “Dure” is an exploration of a subject that recedes from view. The poem can thus be read as a disavowal of itself. Foucault maintains that Las Meninas presents “an essential void” of the subject who has disappeared along with the canons of classical representation (18). Dworkin, I think, has a slightly different end in mind: something like a return of the subject through history and lived experience. This return of the subject can be read as a response to the postwar avant-garde’s most severe prohibitions on “the lyrical ego”–but this return of the subject can be interpreted in other ways as well: as a response to the high modernist use (and abuse) of quotation; as a new hybrid poetic mode; or (as I am primarily reading the poem here) as an investigation of conditions for the articulation of pain. Dworkin gets to the crux of the problem when he interjects “Why write this?” between the German and English renderings of the text of the self-portrait (Strand 75). The italicized this is a kind of tear in the referential system through which the author points his finger.
 
Immediately following the dubious citations from the OED, Dworkin’s first reference is to Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, from which he has not in fact quoted. Memoirs nonetheless contains striking parallels to “Dure,” and one can describe “Dure” as haunted by specters of Derrida (although the poem was published prior to Derrida’s death). Memoirs begins with a mock self-interview, the opening line of which is: “Do you believe this?” There is no italicization to this, but the parallel to “Dure” is clear. The mock interviewer or analyst of Memoirs probes further, and it is revealed that what he [Derrida] most “fear[s] is the monocular vision of things” (1). Derrida equates self-portraiture with blindness, and dialogue with sight–suggesting that we cannot see ourselves other than for a fleeting instant, and that in this we see our own ruin, as well as the ruin of all that we know. Only through loving the other can we overcome “the monocular vision of things”:
 

Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; it loses its integrity without disintegrating. . . .
 
Whence the love of ruins. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory–in mourning–of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin?
 

(Derrida 68)

 

The fearful moment is one of gazing upon ourselves narcissistically. But it is also, in Freudian terms, a moment in which we might shift from the limitlessness of melancholy toward a more manageable state of mourning. Derrida describes the self-portrait as the very image of

 

mourning and melancholy, the specter of the instant [stigme] and of the stylus, whose very point would like to touch the blind point of the gaze that looks itself in the eyes and is not far from sinking into those eyes, right up to the point of losing its sight through an excess of lucidity. An Augenblick without duration, “during” which, however, the draftsman feigns to stare at the center of the blind spot. Even if nothing happens, if no event takes place, the signatory blinds himself to the rest of the world.
 

(69)

 

It is here that Derrida and Dworkin seem most closely to cross paths. One might even go so far as to suggest that this moment “without duration, ‘during’” which the artist purports to represent himself, is the subject of Dworkin’s reflection on pain. (That Derrida places “during” in scare quotes would seem to heighten the appropriative resonance.) “The blind spot” which Derrida evokes is eerily similar to the “yellow spot” pointed at by the figure in the self-portrait. The object of “Dure” then would be to create an index of pain–to make us literally feel (through the index finger) and see (through language) the absent pain of the blind subject who presumably cannot sign his own name -which in Derridean terms would suggest that the blind self-portraitist cannot be fixed as a proper name within a system of signification. The self-portraitist’s pain cannot, so to speak, dure in the sense of remaining lastingly present to himself or to a viewer. The self-portraitist cannot en-dure this unrepresentability of pain; like Milton’s semi-autobiographical Samson, he is self-blinded.

 
Throughout “Dure,” Dworkin intersperses strictly factual paraphrase with densely gnomic poetic utterances, as in the second section:
 

The assumption is that Dürer drew it for a consultation with a foreign physician: the page examined, and passed, through the post. Aphetic, fr. Port. “A mark or trace indicating a point of attachment, of some structure that has been rem—.” Oval, ascher, chalk, a nerre. Embers, as cendres, rose, and caught her eyes. “All under the influence of the verb. Meaning a letting go, and via the home.
 

(Strand 76)

 

Beginning straightforwardly, this section seems to disintegrate. Once again, the source notes refer us to the OED, and again the definition quoted proves elusive. Dworkin seems to define “Aphetic,” but the OED defines it as “Pertaining to, or resulting from, aphesis,” which is “The gradual and unintentional loss of a short unaccented vowel at the beginning of a word; as in squire for esquire.” Etymologically, “aphetic” does not derive from Portuguese but from the Greek apheta, “the giver of life in a nativity.” When we consult page 584 of the OED we find as another definition of scar: “A mark or trace indicating the point of attachment of some structure that has been removed.” For this reader at least, “rem–“immediately calls to mind “remembered.” Removed, indeed. Rather than word preceding definition, in “Dure” definition seems to precede word. If Dworkin’s raiding of the dictionary is a characteristically Oulipian procedure, it should be noted that Dworkin’s constraints are less programmatic, and that he seems ready to relinquish constraints in order to convey indirect meaning–or perhaps to mirror meaning. As an example of this mirroring of meaning: According to the OED, there was in fact an aphetic version of “scar,” “escara,” which was used in Spanish and Portuguese. Aphesis is also uncannily close to its opposite, “apocope,” in meaning–apocope being the “cutting off or omission of the last letter or syllable of a word.” The word “escara” is aphectically amputated to become “scar”; likewise the proper name “Dürer” is apocopically amputated to become “Dure.” Dworkin’s rendering elides much of this information in a performative erasure. The descriptive act becomes figured not only as reductive, but as amputating and violent.

 
The exact cause of the wound or “lapse” which causes the scar of “Dure” is never revealed, although critics have suggested the sources both of Dürer’s and Dworkin’s scars. Marjorie Perloff suggests that the closest we get to “the poet’s own ‘scar,’ finally com[ing] out into the open” (268) is in Section 22 (which, like so much of the poem, is difficult to quote selectively):
 

“Writing is a strange shadow whose sole purpose is to mark the destruction of the body that once stood between its light and its earth.” Skiagraphy, touch-type, and method. A run of his finger feels nothing now that the surface has smoothed, but can still make out the thin ellipse floating on his forearm like a shadow under shallow skin, and can trace its curve, left from the time she pushed him into the stove, and know that this is his proof: whatever else, she felt that strongly, she really did care this much that once. He who forgets that love lasts will not recognize its fist. Carp, suspended, mottle and kern. The entire text is an attempt to ask: “how can something be the shadow of a fact which does not exist?” The problem is not finding a solution, but simply posing the proper question. “Don’t you know then, what I mean, when I say the stove is in pain?”
 

(Dworkin, Strand 100)

 

The first quotation is from Paul Mann’s Masocriticism, the last two from Wittgenstein. The joke is that the poet-critic is poking at his own wound, in what can only be taken as a masocritical gesture. The poet’s finger feels nothing, but his memory recalls being pushed into a stove, presumably by a lover. Is this a “declarative confessional statement”? Throughout the poem, Dworkin intersperses extracts from philosophers and literary critics with extracts from medical texts, offering few explicit transitions. The effect of this is to conflate multiple specialized discourses. Skiagraphy, for instance, can refer either to shadow-painting or to radiography. In operating on the body of language, the critic is like a surgeon. In operating on his own writing, the critic is like a surgeon operating on himself. As in the other sections of the sequence, Dworkin includes triadic (sometimes quadratic) sentences without active verbs. “Skiagraphy” precedes “touch-typing”–the activity in which the writer must presumably engage to write this. The multiple frames of reference–medical, art historical, philosophical–seem always to point back to the author. But this is perhaps a trick of perspective: the only “I” in this passage is in quotations. Perloff notes that “Dworkin’s language game oddly becomes most personal when it interweaves the Dürer materials with the ‘impersonal’ propositions of Wittgenstein on pain” (267). When Dworkin ends the passage with a passage from Wittgenstein, he ingeniously inverts cause and effect in the scarring process. “Don’t you know then, what I mean, when I say the stove is in pain?” (Philosophical 350) asks Wittgenstein, granting agency and feeling to an inanimate (and in this context presumably painful) object. Conventional subject-object relations are reversed in this formulation to the degree that, although we assume it is Dworkin speaking and enduring the painful memory, we don’t in fact know who is speaking for whom when Wittgenstein says “the stove is in pain.” The suggestion is that we are best able to identify with something or someone when the gaze is reversed, enabling us not only to see the stove’s pain, but also Wittgenstein’s pain–and by extension Dworkin’s (and our own) pain. Although Dworkin figures the quotation (or the citation) as a painful mark on the body, he sees a healing, suturing aspect to the quotation as well: “With healing he’ll worry the tissues in a morose delectation, the fingertip testing its sensation, and that lack, with an unreciprocated pressure: the nerves failing to complete their narcissistic circuit, so back and fore to get at figuring this fascination of a flesh that is no longer ours” (78). The patient-self cultivates his pain, which can only be felt through indirect means. The pain caused by the pointing finger is a pleasure of narcissism, as well as a pleasure of detachment. “Dure” can be said to attempt to overcome the classic double bind of melancholy, wherein the melancholic begins to enjoy his own suffering.

 
In trying to find a way to point selectively to pain in a world of sensory overload–or in a pain-full world, so to speak–“Dure” ends up doubling back on itself, and acknowledging the “bittersweetness” of separation from a lover.⁷ Characteristically, Dworkin points in many directions, as when he introduces a Kandinsky title and integrates it into the associative rhythms of his own prose:
 

Point and Line to Plane. The scar, in essence, is simply the deformation of any particular breaking the surface of its abstraction. I am; we are; to love. A mar on the undifferentiated expanse of language, writing is the scar left from its abrasion with the world (with use, with us, without). From paint to point to pain. A ridge of bristled locks impinged upon the singed and cotton stock. But if a scar is always a citation, are citations, themselves, always scars?
 

(86)

 

If the point is the specific place of the wound, then perhaps the plane is the more generalized axis of the representative afterlife of the pain symbolized by the scar. Learned citation might be the form of therapy appropriate to the scholar, as for instance in the compulsive citationality of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton’s famous claim–“I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy” (20)–resonates well with conceptual writing’s concern with meta-writing and with performativity. The Anatomy is also instructive in that, like “Dure,” it borrows unapologetically from multiple discourses–medical, philosophical, psychological, and literary. Yet despite the pervasive citationalism of “Dure,” no proper names–other than Dürer–are ever mentioned in the body of the poem. This, I suggest, pre-emptively undoes one of the scarring aspects of quotation–namely that every quotation that is attached to a proper name is paleonymic, and carries with it something like a transaction record in terms of the circulation of cultural capital.⁸ Dworkin seems to note the importance of this omission of proper names in the poem’s conclusion, when he quotes Charles Sanders Peirce in the context of a discussion of Augustine’s Confessions:

 

“A proper name without signification, a pointing finger, is a degenerate index.” The taste of this pear lingered, on the edge of ferment. This sees me, or merely fits. O fado, of ado, adieu. “The last, construed as sing.” And this, in its seizure: apprehensive, rested, blue. “I marked this place with my finger or by some other sign and closed the book.” This is who we are (this), and (this) this is what we do to one another: by chance, by the hour, by ourselves.
 

(Strand 102)

 

Perhaps a quotation out of context is also a degenerate index if it becomes impossible to tell who was originally pointing at what. By referring to Augustine, Dworkin suggests that there is an element of chance in our linguistic appropriations. As soon as Augustine converts, he picks up Paul’s Epistles in order to perform a variation on the practice of Sortes Vergilianae–except that whereas a pagan Roman would have put down his finger randomly in the Aeneid, Augustine randomly places his finger on a passage from Paul fervently condemning the sins of the flesh. Even with a foreknowledge of his eventual salvation, the (involuntary) memory of the famous (voluntary) peach-theft will never leave him. Augustine’s finger has apparently touched upon an invisible textual scar.

In closing “Dure” with this instance of aleatory intertextuality, Dworkin brings to bear still more receding perspectives and voices, and alludes to Augustine’s position as (arguably) the writer of the first autobiography. In this context, the reference cannot help but also bring to mind John Ashbery’s poem “Sortes Vergilianae.” “Dure” seems to be haunted not only by Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, but also by Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Like “Dure,” “Self-Portrait” is quotational in ways that undermine a traditional notion of a lyric ego or of a formal verse line:
 

Sydney Freedberg in his
Parmigianino says of it: “Realism in this portrait
No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria . . . .
However its distortion does not create
A feeling of disharmony . . . . The forms retain
A strong measure of ideal beauty,” because
Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left.
 

(73)

 

Ashbery’s verse, in comparison with Dworkin’s prose, is laconic and dreamy in its fluid interweaving of scholarly background material. Ashbery marks an absence, a hole in the pattern of meaning. A sense of an Ashberyan “you,” or an Ashberyan “we,” is missing from “Dure”–or perhaps the “we” of Ashbery’s “we notice the hole they left” has been replaced by a kind of lost thisness. “This is who we are (this), and (this) this is what we do to one another: by chance, by the hour, by ourselves.” The this is doubled, or rather tripled or quadrupled, in this one sentence. But there is no plural form of this. Dworkin is interested in the problem of how “we” can even describe objects, much less relate to other subject positions. “This is who we are (this)” is nearly tautological, except that the second “this” is in parentheses (in much the same manner that “Why write this” is italicized).

 
Dworkin suggests that every this is marked–or scarred. We can only get at shadow thises marked by quotations or by italics. In the end, Dworkin comes to see the second-order articulation problem of thisness as not only a hurtful condition, but also as a condition which must be recognized in order to effect a healing process. Section 20 is among the sequence’s most direct:
 

Proof of an irreconcilable event, the drawing may itself be a scar. Or is it merely emblematic of the fact that pain cannot be shown, but that the showing of pain can be shown? I can’t, in any meaningful sense, express my pain, but I can show you myself in the act of making that expression-however empty it may ultimately be. To point without the I makes a bridge. Empathetic deixis cedes to a rigid linguistic proxemics. ‘If, in saying I, I point to my own body, I model the use of the word “I” on that of the demonstrative. But in I have pain, “I” is not a demonstrative pronoun.’ The drawing was, perhaps, a philosophical grammar.
 

(96)

 

If the drawing is a scar, then “Dure” itself is a scar within a scar–and yet Dworkin casts doubt on this doubling and tripling of remove from actual experience. There may be no stable, unitary “I” to speak of: “to point without the I” would seem to be the best way to communicate pain. And yet this too is an unsatisfactory formulation. The lexicon of words for pain, like the lexicon of words for beauty, is limited. As important as articulating pain is an articulation of the conditions for articulating pain. The redoubling of language, or the quotation of the quotation, leaves behind a scar that is both the trace of an injury and the trace of a healing process. Perhaps an “empathetic deixis” is possible, although not easy. One could do far worse than the sentiments found in the get-well card’s programmatic expression of sympathetic identification. “A philosophical grammar” here, far from being cold and clinical, constitutes a kind of bridge between Is–for which, like this, there is no plural form. When Dworkin asks chiastically–“But if a scar is always a citation, are citations, themselves, always scars?”–his true/false answer has to be “false.” The citation is scarred, and carries with it a history of domination, exclusion, and violence–but the citation is not always scarring. Persons who cite complicate their own “I” every time they acknowledge an other. The citation also reconciles an “I” with a community. If these sound like platitudes, I would counter that “Dure” forces us to recognize that such platitudes are part of the difficulty of finding adequate forms of “empathetic deixis.”

 
Quotation is often framed pejoratively as a diminution of subjectivity, or as a violent repudiation of originality. “Dure” complicates this view. Thomas Keenan explains quotation in terms that borrow from Marx’s phantasmagoric descriptions of capitalism:
 

The quotation itself functions as a monster or a ghost, an uncanny visitor accumulated from another text. And it depends on a structural condition of words–they can be reproduced, mindlessly and mechanically reproduced-which acts as if they were nothing but commodities: to be accumulated, moved and removed to and from contexts, delayed and relayed between texts only to be grafted or inserted into some other text, transferred like (als) property or the mechanical limb (a forearm, let’s say; after all, forewarned is forearmed) on a monster.
 

(104-105)

 

In such a formulation, quotations are like commodities that embody false cultural values. Quotations are near-meaningless manufactured statements that in the aggregate constitute a Frankensteinian body of severed meaning. In this account of the quotation, the ghost haunting textual production might in fact be creativity. All quotes potentially become scare quotes. The Leviathan of language seems to tolerate no new quotations–or at least no new quotations that are not in the interests of monster-capital’s continuing growth. Keenan is not alone in formulating the quotation as monstrous and violent. In her discussion of “Dure,” Perloff quotes Antoine Compagnon’s study La Seconde main, in which Compagnon argues: “When I cite, I excise, I mutilate, I extract. . . . The chosen fragment converts itself into a text, no longer a bit of text, a part of a sentence or of discourse, but a chosen bit, an amputated limb, not yet as a transplant, but already an organ, cut off and placed in reserve” (qtd. in Perloff 264). Like Keenan, Compagnon sees quotation primarily as a lack rather than as a supplement. Quotation can also be understood–as it has so often been for literary writers before the twentieth century–as a central component of any authoritative text (as in Burton). A pretentious practice perhaps, but not necessarily a severing or a theft–dead authors, after all, can hardly preserve their own body parts.

 
A particularly strong influence (though she is quoted only once) on “Dure” is Lyn Hejinian. In an essay on Hejinian, Dworkin describes “the largely citational mode” of My Life as a quiltwork, suggesting that the poem “emphasizes its citationality by incorporating apparently quoted material without quotation marks and, conversely (so quoted, coded), framing some phrases in marks of quotation without apparent significance and without citing a speaker or source” (“Penelope” 62). Rather than a violent severing of tradition, the quotations of My Life are constitutive fragments of a new feminist subjectivity, grounded in quiltmaking as an autobiographical process. Whereas My Life, for the most part, unweaves its own paleonymy by erasing its quotations’ sources, “Dure” reweaves its quotations into its source apparatus. Perhaps to cite as well as to quote is to come closer to revealing a source code. “So quoted, coded” (137) Dworkin quotes Hejinian parenthetically without quotation marks. Like many works considered under the rubric of Language writing in the 1970s and 80s, My Life is replete with détourned clichés, fragments of speech, and appropriated phrases–few of which are cited. Another example in this mode is Bob Perelman’s 1978 “An Autobiography,” a poem constructed entirely of uncited quotations. Later scholarly works by LANGUAGE writers often follow standard academic protocols for citation–but LANGUAGE poetry in its earlier phases typically does not cite sources, at least not in the exhaustive manner of “Dure.” Dworkin has written extensively about Susan Howe, whose hybrid combination of literary scholarship and personal reflection in works such as My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-mark is also relevant to his work.
 
What if the “I” is always a misquotation borrowed from a collectively-authored work-in-progress? If academic literary criticism effaces the “I” in its reliance on citation, Dworkin re-introduces the “I” by means of communications that contain their own critique. To re-appropriate Wittgenstein again, perhaps the limits of my language are the limits of my I. The “I” in itself (or the I-in-itself) is necessarily appropriated from a cultural grammar. If there is no privileged position outside of the system of cultural production from which to stage a disinterested critique, then literature, in order to construct a viable politics of resistance, must come to terms with itself as a system that preserves privileged forms of cultural authority. The quotation is analogous to the cell form of literary production. Like the commodity, it is the smallest recognizable unit in a system of proprietary exchange. A quotation “appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 163). I is not only an other–it is many others who participate in a system of recognizable protocols for expression.
 
My first epigraph embodies the notion that quotations take on a life of their own in Dworkin’s writing: “Quotation marks ticked through the body of the text like sutures arched in stitches that will scar” (“Dure” 79). Note the twists and turns of this sentence: as well as scarring, the quotation marks “tick”; they “suture”; they “stitch.” The scar may never heal, but it also may hurt less over time the better its causes and effects are understood. Perhaps the most famous instance in twentieth-century literature of quotations taking on a life of their own is in Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, a work that helps define Benjamin’s own heavily quotational style: “Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction” (481). The “idle stroller” to whom Benjamin refers sounds much a like a flâneur. In Benjamin’s elaborate conceit, the reader is a lazy passerby confronted by too much textual information–too many advertisements and too many books. Rather than being scarred by the quotation, the strolling reader is relieved of a presumably false conviction. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben suggests that the quotation is not merely passive but able to take on an agency of its own: “the word enclosed within quotation marks is only waiting its moment of revenge. . . . He who puts a word in quotation marks can no longer rid himself of it: suspended in mid-air in its signifying élan, the word becomes unsubstitutable” (103-4). As Benjamin and Agamben show, it is possible for tradition to work against tradition, and for the quotation not only to be the bearer of violence, but also for the quotation to resist–and to articulate–suffering, even if that suffering is represented secondhand.
 
“But what sort of doctor would diagnose a sketch?” Dworkin asks in medias res, hypothesizing that the Dürer portrait may have been sent by mail to a distant doctor (Strand 84). “What sort of a doctor,” indeed, Dr. Dworkin? Perhaps a doctor who is not a medical doctor, but rather a scholar and a poet–a doctor who, when in doubt, “resorts to a quote.”
 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Choreography for Camera (1945)

Anagram of Film Form (1946)

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

 

 
“Man is distinguished [from machines] for consciousness, time perspective, and original energy. So is anything that lasts.” When the New York avant-garde film maker Maya Deren writes these words in her diary in 1947 in response to a lecture at the New School by Gregory Bateson, in which Bateson discusses the application of game theory to the study of culture and psychology, she expresses an idea, often repeated since, that time is of central concern to the cinematic art (“Notebook” 45). At first, her quote seems an unlikely response to the mathematical logic of games. Game theory, nested as it is within the rubric of war-time operations research and computing, appears distant from any 18^th century romantic ideals of the human Deren may harbor. The filmmaker does, however, intuitively identify a major historical point: that any such technical revision of time and representation would indelibly mark the subject and transform perception.
 
Deren poses two questions in her notebook that reveal her logic. Game theory is a technique to model, simulate, and predict the behavior of systems when there is incomplete information (for example, when one encounters an unknown enemy force). It is, and continues to be, a technology for control of the unknown. Her first concern, therefore, is about how to engage with an indeterminate Other through logic. In her notebook, Deren questions the universal applicability of such game theoretical models. Implicitly, she interrogates the universalist assumptions of these models about the behavior of both individuals and societies. I argue that intuitively she identifies a homogenizing force within the technical logic of the game.
 
Second, Deren expresses a concern about the relationship between prediction and control. She asks whether “linear analysis” is an appropriate model for thinking cultural systems and predicting or controlling their future actions (“Notebook” 25). Linear systems, in Bateson’s mathematical logic, are predictable, non-chaotic systems. That is, linearity is a mathematical term used to define systems that do not advance teleologically in time. Linear models assume that the past and the future are the same, and that reactions can be reversed. Control in Bateson’s discourse, and in game theory, however, is not supposed to be linear but probabilistic. Games are theoretically supposed to generate a number of possible futures. Control is understood by the anthropologist, therefore, as the ability to take action and to plan under probabilistic, not deterministic conditions. Deren sub-consciously notices a tension here; arguing that while spoken in terms of change and feedback, Bateson’s models may have imbedded within them an older historical concept of control as deterministic, understood as the perfect prediction of future action from past data. Arguably, then, Deren and Bateson share a concern about the relationship between the image, or the model, and the world to come (“Notebook” 43-46).
 
As a filmmaker whose writings and cinematic practices are pervaded by discourses of a predictive and probabilistic temporality, Deren identifies in her work a particular concern with time, one that integrates chance, control, and memory. For example, in her classic 1946 methodological treatise, “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film,” she argues that art must become an experiment, like science, and embrace its true potential–a break from realism in order to produce an even greater reality:
 

should the artist, like the scientist, exercize [sic] his imaginative intelligence–the command and control of memory–to consciously try, test, modify, destroy, estimate probabilities, and try again . . . always in terms of the instrument by which the fusion will be realized.
 

(“Anagram” 13. Emphasis added.)

Her language is revelatory. Framed in terms of “estimate probabilities” and the “command and control” of memory, her words already suggest that time has something to do with odds and manipulation. This kind of language is the uncanny doppelganger of the game theories that Bateson discusses, which are also framed in terms of probability, statistics, control, and chance. Time here is not something to be shown, but rather an operation, a process, the “control of memory” whose outcome is the production and destruction of probabilities. In retrospect, therefore, Bateson and Deren share in a discourse that is predictive rather than invested in presence or the present.

 
Deren is, in fact, at the lecture because she wants to bridge art and science, and to rethink the work of representation and the image. She seeks to appropriate Bateson’s thought and ethnographic work for her cinematic practice. Deren’s training in gestalt and behavioral psychology spurred her initial interest in Bateson’s psychological and ethnographic investigations of trance, dance, and ritual in highland Bali in the late 1930s.
 

 

 

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Fig. 2.

Communication as Gesture: The body recorded as a medium, in Bateson’s work, for the production of culture. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Trance and Dance in Bali (1952). Footage shot 1937-39.¹

 

 
Throughout the late 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead worked in highland Bali studying culture and schizophrenia. In the interest of developing new methods for ethnography and capturing the intricacies of daily life in the villages where they worked, they created a vast archive of photographic stills and cinematic footage (see Fig. 2 above). To this day, their archive is considered foundational in visual anthropology. (Curiously enough, it also inspired the concept of the plateau for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.) Deren was given full access to this footage for use in developing her own cinematic practices, and the exposure to this massive visual archive brings her to encounter another form of abstraction–models of communication and game theories.²
 
This is already, therefore, a convoluted and rhizomatic history of Deren’s interest in subjectivity and perception, but it has much to say about our contemporary conceptions of the image and the screen in media and film history and theory. That Deren focuses on the locus between game theories, psychology, cinema, and the ethnographic encounter is hardly a side note. I want to use this highly specific discourse of “time” in Deren’s work to ask a series of questions that open onto both a history of representation and an ethics of the image: what notions of time are being specified? How might we understand the debates between an artist and an ethnographer? And between mathematical theories of computing and an ideal of art framed in temporal terms? Most importantly, what is at stake in the relationship between time and the image at this moment in Western intellectual history? Bateson and Deren do not merely intersect chronologically, but rather share a conceptual rubric within which the question of temporality as an ethical and representational problem is posed. Deren’s engagement with Bateson, therefore, brings together a personal encounter and a moment in the history of western representation as theoretical machines that help situate, explore, and expand our understanding of time and the image.
 
This interaction between art and science shows how the same conditions of possibility, and similar genealogies of discipline and training, can produce radically different forms of practice. Deren’s concept of temporality and representation is both similar to and radically different from those emerging in psychology, anthropology, communication science and game theory after the war. This cinema, I argue, excavates the probabilistic and reflexive nature of time, as understood in both art and science during this period, to create new associations between subjects, screens, and life. However, Deren’s work produces associations and potentials that the game theories and technologies with which she is concerned do not. Her work uses the discourse of temporality and representation taken from the sciences but refuses to repeat without difference, thus blocking a return to older discourses of objectivity, authority, and knowledge.
 

Chance, Control, and Memory

 
In 1946, a few months before she attends Bateson’s lectures, Maya Deren introduces a new structure for the image:
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Contents of “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde; Ed. Bill Nichols; Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

 

 
It is an opening diagram in one of the most famous treatises on the theory and practice of cinema–“An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film.” The “Anagram,” for Deren, is both a theory of cinema and an instructional blueprint for cinematic production. Deren is a very structural filmmaker who diagrams and carefully choreographs every scene and shot beforehand. The “Anagram” is a visualization of this process.
 
This figure is both a game of letters and a structure for visual recombination. She recommends this form “to anyone who has faced the problem of compressing into a linear organization an idea which was stimulating precisely because it extended into two or three different, but not contradictory directions at once” (“Anagram” 6). Already in her opening notes, Deren expresses a complex relationship to teleological narrative and historical time. Negotiating between structure and novelty, this is a system of self-referring elements, each producing a totality irreducible to its parts. No part of it may be changed without “affecting the whole;” every element is able to produce different possibilities through recombination. Because the anagram can be read to produce a myriad of effects in any direction, as one might read “horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or even in reverse,” Deren proposes a world no longer described by linear cause-effect relations but, rather, by feedback loops.
 
For Deren, time, understood as progress, or causality, may be broken, since elements may be recombined in any order, but it is still directional. These recombinatory readings operate in different directions, but their results remain an emergent “whole.” Deren also argues that “nothing is new… except, perhaps, the anagram itself” (“Anagram” 6). This is a curious statement, and it denotes a subtle ontological shift. Nothing is new in that the forms and images come from the past; what is new, for Deren, is the process by which an already known and recorded world is reformulated. The anagram is this process, and its novelty lies in producing a whole that exceeds its parts and emerges as art. The anagram, therefore, is an auto-poietic form bridging past and future, producing possibilities for cinematic practice out of the remains of the past (“Anagram” 7). This form makes manifest her notion of the “control of memory” (“Anagram” 13). In the world she envisions, innovation comes through recombination. The work of the movie-maker is thus to produce forms that will generate future possibilities irreducible to their singular parts.
 
Deren is clear about her disinterest in indexical or documentary practices of image making. This is not a discourse of temporality invested in inscription and representation; by extension, it is also not a discourse invested in the present or presence. Deren speaks to an emergent obsession in both science and art–not in documenting the real or discovering nature, but in producing imagination and transcending historical experience by way of the “instrument.” Science, she argues, is already an endeavor of the artificial: “If the achievements of [contemporary] science are the result of a violation of natural integrity, in order to emancipate its elements and re-relate them, how can an artist be content to do no more than to perceive, analyze and, at most, recreate these ostensibly inviolable whole of nature?” (“Anagram” 23). Art should not, therefore, attempt to return to nature. Instead, art has to embark on a new truth:
 

To renounce the natural frame of reference–the natural logic and integrity of an existent reality–is not, as is popularly assumed, an escape from the labor of truth. . . . To create a form of life is, in the final analysis, much more demanding than to render one which is ready-made.
 

(“Anagram” 23)

To break with the documentary tradition, she writes, is not to “escape the labor of truth,” but rather to affirm it, to create a greater truth: “a form of life.” Her words both gesture to a history of the automation of representation and perception, that of the “ready-made,” as well as to a nascent aspiration to break terminally with nature to produce reality. Deren, therefore, mutates or replaces concern with “the natural frame of reference” as a prescriptive idea of perception for another set of concerns about prediction and performance.

 
Deren calls upon the genealogy of science to make this argument. She writes of a process by which human perception was remade:
 

Through mathematical computations, he [man] was able to extend his knowledge even beyond the reach of his instruments. From a careful analysis of causation and incidence, he developed the powers of prediction. And finally, not content to merely analyze an existent reality, he undertook to activate the principles which he had discovered, to manipulate reality, and to bring together into new relationships the elements which he was able to isolate. He was able to create forms according to his own intelligence.
 

(“Anagram” 8)

Deren cites as historical reference and inspiration the emergence of probability, the erosion of determinism, and the manipulation of reality by new techniques and optical instruments. She diagrams a new relationship between probabilistic thought and subjective vision, a form of visuality that accedes to the self-production and technical nature brought about through “computations” and techniques.

 
Aside from Bateson’s influence, the source of Deren’s familiarity with computers or game theory is uncertain. What is clear is that in training and discourse she shares much with the anthropologist. In her own life, as is by now well documented, Deren draws influence from the physical and psychological sciences, as well as from figures such as Henri Bergson. She was the daughter of a practicing psychiatrist in Syracuse, New York, who was part of the new Russian school for objective psychology in St. Petersburg before coming to the United States in 1922 to escape the civil war. At this school, Dziga Vertov studied and experimented with his cinematic practices in 1917 (Holl 157). Deren was close to her father, and in her undergraduate and graduate education she pursued the study of psychology, particularly gestalt psychology with Kurt Koffka at Smith College in the late 1930s.³ The relationship between science and art continues to play out through her work. Deren’s work is permeated with her interest in psychology, and also with discussions of physics, the Bomb, and games. Her archive contains folders titled “communication.” Her interest in ethnography puts her in direct conversation with structuralist anthropologists concerned with communication and linguistic theories. In fact, her training in psychology, and gestalt in particular, is intimately correlated to the sciences of communication, computing, and cognition. At a moment when minds, machines, and media are all being transformed, many different practices share in the reformulation of representation (“Climate”).⁴
 
Deren shares much with the technologies and sciences of her time. While critical of the bomb and conscious of the dangers of technology, she is also faintly hopeful that art’s relationship with science can invigorate both. For her, tools coming from the sciences offer the possibility of control over memory and the potential to reinvent cinema and reinvigorate art after the war. The “Anagram” essay maps Deren’s points of reference and her hope for the image, an image no longer invested in older forms of knowledge, but rather in the creation of “forms,” an image that recombines past histories of probability and technology to produce, she hopes, new effects.
 
I do not wish to imply here that Deren is directly related to the development of digital or electronic media. Rather, I wish to show that post-war cinema, post-war anthropology and communication sciences demonstrate similar attitudes towards representation. This engagement between art and the social, communication, and psychological sciences after the war allows me to ask where these endeavors intersect and where they differentiate themselves. I want, therefore, to focus our attention on the aspect of Deren’s theories that highlights a historical transformation in both ontology and epistemology. But I also want to mark her curious insistence, almost a demand, that art be separate from science. In this intimate effort to both engage and separate from the physical and psychological sciences, we can begin to understand relationships between time, difference, technology, and representation in the post-war image.
 

Inscription, Representation, and Cinema

 
To link the anagram to histories of epistemology and temporality, I want to situate Deren’s anagrammatic “image” within the history of representation and knowledge. The opening tropes in the “Anagram” essay develop key themes critical to understanding the relationship between memory, temporality, and control that structures Deren’s conception of cinematic time. First, Deren folds a 19^th and early 20^th century concern with chance and control into a new cinematic practice. Her discourse of time is, arguably, probabilistic and associated with a history of anti-determinist thinking in the sciences and in philosophy.
 
Second, Deren demonstrates a historical change in the ontology of the image. Throughout her writing, Deren explicitly attacks both disorganization (she is a highly structured filmmaker, pre-diagramming and storyboarding all her movies) and immediacy. She explicitly and repeatedly condemns what she labels “presentism” (“Anagram”). How can we understand this denial of the present in the name of structure and prediction? And how does it relate to modern concepts of probability and the representability of time?
 
Many historians have noted that the 19th century saw the emergence of two phenomena-the rise of mechanical objectivity and what Ian Hacking calls “the taming of chance.” In physics through thermodynamics, in evolutionary biology, in the social sciences, and in psychology and physiology, there emerged a recognition of the limits of representation, a consciousness that the world was variable and contingent. This worldview opposes the paradigm of Newtonian physics. In Newton’s universe, there can be perfect information; equations predict the future action of the system and reactions can always be reversed. In Newtonian physics, time’s arrow flows both forward and backward and nature is amenable to representation through mathematics and images. In a world that is non-deterministic, however, time cannot be reversed and the future can never be perfectly predicted. The recognition of an inability to legibly represent the present and thus know and control the future (a recognition of chance), combined with the teleological arrow of thermodynamic time directed towards chaos, disorder, and degradation, created anxieties about the representability of time itself.
 
This representational crisis in the late 19^th century was embedded in and abetted by early cinema. Cinema, like science, desperately sought to fulfill an impossible task: both to be able to record “everything,” to access the absolute zenith of the knowable and the seeable–the index, the present, the event–and to render this deluge of data coherent, representable, and legible to the human observer. Cinema and science both produced consciousness of the limits of human perception and representation, rendering visible the difficulty of making choices under conditions of imperfect information, while inducing a desire to surmount this limit to knowledge through new forms of documentation and analysis (Doane 4).
 
Objectivity thus seemed unattainable when the era increasingly recognized the impossibility of controlling the visual data field and predicting the future, while simultaneously desiring to do both. Science contends with this inability to gain complete knowledge of the world–chance–with a desire to document, organize, and archive everything. Chance and the index are thus bound together through the epistemologies of archiving and new visualization technologies that characterize positivistic 19^th and early 20^th century sciences. Arguably, this era’s concern with representing time correlates with a desire to document the present (ontology and the index) and the concomitant demand for a mechanical objectivity to control a field of vision lent autonomy through the machine of cinema and anti-deterministic epistemologies (Doane 4; Daston and Galison).
 
For Deren, however, the problem of knowledge and epistemological control is replaced with the question of creating life-forms. She signifies a slow erosion of the dream of accessing the present in the name of a new and obsessive concern with imagination or the virtual framed in the future perfect tense, a desire not for the document and the index but for the production of effects in anticipation of the future. Deren’s lack of interest in the index and the present is therefore a marked shift. While adhering to a probabilistic and teleological (although not necessarily progressive) time, Deren is only interested in two loci–the past and the future.
 
The third salient structure for Deren’s architecture of time involves memory and the archive. The displacement of concern for the index is accompanied with emergent interest in memory and the archive as infinite repositories of possibility for recombination. Deren is obsessively concerned with the future and with forms or structures that are auto-poietic. Surprisingly, however, this predictive or anticipatory attitude develops by displacing the problem of recording. Deren assumes that the past is available for recombination and no longer worries about its capture; as we shall see, indexicality is not so much destroyed as simply deferred and repressed. There is a curious structure of time in this cinema (but also in communication sciences) where feedback loops generate future actions.
 
These three elements–probability, prediction, and manipulation–work together to fundamentally reframe the dream of what cinema might become and speak to broader transformations in the idea of temporality and its ethical and moral stakes. It is Deren herself who points out the incumbent risks now attached to time: “For the serious artist the esthetic problem of form is, essentially, and simultaneously, a moral problem” (“Anagram” 37). She hints that what is at stake in this effort to rethink temporality, memory, and the image is the future both of media and of thought.
 

The New Image

 
These attitudes towards recording, recombination, and structure are embodied within the anagrammatic logic and structure of Deren’s films. Her first movie, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made with her husband, the Czech émigré Alexander Hammid, animates this recombinatorial aesthetics, illuminating, in her words, “the malevolent vitality of inanimate objects” (Meshes).⁵ Her definition of the film–joining vitality with the inanimate–already suggests a revision of ontology and perception. The movie is, indeed, a psychotic dream world, perhaps reflecting and advancing the on-going war condition. More importantly, it is a world where the interiority and exteriority of the subject are confused. The film is, in Deren’s estimation, “a dream that takes such force it becomes reality” (Legend 78). It is a film where the abstract processes of perception take material form through editing and repetition.
 
Since Meshes of the Afternoon is the most narrative of her films, many critics argue that the movie wavers between this emergent aesthetic and older classical forms of cinema. However, the dominant device in the film is a rhythmic mirroring, or feedback, between the possibly exterior and interior states, that anticipates the anagrammatic method. Every scene is filled with parallels: a falling flower transforms into a knife, the telephone off the hook is doubled by a knife falling onto a table, and a potentially loving caress between a man and knife redoubles upon itself as a potential murder scene (“Pre-production Notes”). These scenes repeat themselves in the course of the film, each time slightly mutating to produce different comprehensions. Deren also regularly doubles or multiplies the same image in the scene, for example in a moment when she encounters herself in multiple:
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Mirroring in Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002. DVD.

 

The logic of the film is thus one of repetition and multiplication. Like the anagram, “nothing is new” in that everything has been recorded. The movie keeps repeating its own operations and images, and also regularly recombining montage and symbolic elements from cinema’s history-particularly from Surrealism and Constructivism, both movements producing movies that Deren claims to have seen.

 
However, while Deren may repeat convention and tactic, she does not recuperate these images in the name of unearthing the unconscious or revealing the reality behind ideology. Deren violently opposes any comparison between her work and the psychoanalytic films of surrealists (Legend 280).⁶ She steadfastly maintains that between the screen and the spectator a new reality is emerging, as well as a new psychology. Novelty here is relocated from the scene of capture to the production of this “whole” that encompasses the act of seeing and involves the spectator and the apparatus in producing an experience.
 
In subsequent production notes Deren writes: “Everything which happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence–the knife, the key, the repetition of stairs, the figure disappearing around the curve of the road. Part of the achievement of this film consists in the manner in which cinematic techniques are employed to give a malevolent vitality to inanimate objects” (Legend 78). This lively malevolence emerges from the recombination of set patterns that produces more than the sum of the stills. Careful mapping of repeated images is critical to this form. The archive generates the movie and also produces a new form of liveliness that is beyond the sum of its parts, an accident that emerges from this structured practice.
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Stills from Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
Deren’s film generates a form of attention through rhythmic patterns, not through the conventional integration of sound and image in causal relations. As Wendy Haslem writes, “The rhythm of the sound, movement and editing conspire to produce the effect of a trance film. Meshes of the Afternoon’s dream-like mise-en-scène, illogical narrative trajectory, fluid movement and ambient soundtrack invite a type of contemplative, perhaps even transcendental, involvement for the spectator.”⁷ The diegesis emerges through the repetition and cadencing of elements, the regular interruption of action, and the discontinuity between movements and spaces. The repetition of form and the direct relationship between images produce movement.
 
Deren is explicitly recombinatorial in her logic. She correlates this cinematic practice directly with memory, archiving, and storage. Recalling a history of photography as indexical, she assumes the availability of the image to memory for recombination. She writes:
 

But the celluloid memory of the camera can function, as our memory, not merely to reconstruct or to measure an original chronology. It can place together, in immediate temporal sequence, events actually distant, and achieve, through such relationship a peculiarly filmic reality.
 

(“Anagram” 42)

Cinema here takes the place of memory, but this is a particular memory. In this formulation, the work of cinema is to provide a structure that may produce new forms of time, not merely reflect a time that comes from outside of it. The camera works like our memory, “not merely to reconstruct or to measure an original chronology,” but rather through a “relationship” between images that comes from different situations to produce a new time, “a peculiar filmic reality.” Memory is thus a process of recombination that is not attached to the recollection of the past so much as the production of future imaginaries. The filmic medium, then, is the structure that creates the conditions for this recombination to occur. Deren’s practice integrates both temporal conceptions of chance (the accident of encounter between different images) and statistical control (the production of equations, diagrams, graphs, and other mechanisms) through the structured “game” that is the anagram.

The Image that Acts

 
Deren’s work is obsessed with process, manipulation, and recombination and is not interested in ontology, indexicality, or capture. Time, here, is thus not so much related to the past or the present as to the future. The anagram is a structure that can produce new forms in the future out of the traces of the past. This cinematic practice embodies a shift in tense from the descriptive to the predictive, from documentation to action. Deren is explicit about this transformation from the documentary impulse to another one:
 

When an image induces a generalization and gives rise to an emotion or idea, it bears towards that emotion or idea the same relationship which an exemplary demonstration bears to some chemical principle; and that is entirely different from the relationship between that principle and the written chemical formula by which it is symbolized. In the first case the principle functions actively; in the second case its action is symbolically described, in lieu of the action itself.
 

(“Anagram” 27)

Symbols no longer act as documentary of or referential to an external index, but instead perform operations. It is not what can be seen but what can be done that concerns her.

 
Deren’s “generalizations” are patterns, defining relationships, and not spatially situated objects. Her concept of form is clearly probabilistic in that it generates a potential future action, but it is also communicative in the sense that in communication theory, information is judged by the potential for action. In Deren’s theory, symbols are the condition of possibility for an action. Whereas the chemical formula (a representation) cannot produce the reaction, her notion of symbol or generalization can. Her deferral or repression of presence, ontology, and description facilitates a focus on relations instead of objects. The materialization of the symbol is thus closely correlated with an ideal of a predictive and probabilistic time, and the deferral of a concern with capture and ontology.
 
Deren attempts to enact this idea of symbol literally in her work, for example in her subsequent film A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945). She describes this film as an effort to remove dance from the theater stage and create a new relationship between the camera and the human body. This film is as dynamic as the body, “mobile and volatile as himself. It was, actually a duet–between Talley Beatty, who danced, and space, which was made to dance by means of the camera and cutting” (“Ritual” 225). To this end she drives herself and her performers to new physical and mechanical relations. Talley Beatty recalls the difficulty of filming Choreography (“Interview,” Legend 280):
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 6.

Stills from A Study in Choreography for the Camera. 1945.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002

 

Deren forces Beatty to lean in and out of windows, ledges, and precipices and to hold for long moments poses that are both physically taxing and potentially dangerous (“Interview” 286).

 
In her critics’ estimation, Deren’s work diverges from previous avant-garde traditions, most particularly Surrealism, because her image participates in, rather than records or represents (as abstraction), the movements of the body.⁸ As Deren explains, “Most dance films are records of dances which were originally designed for theatrical stage space and for the fixed stage-front point of view of the audience…In this film I have attempted to place a dancer in limitless, cinematographic space…he shares, with the camera, a collaborative responsibility for the movements themselves. This is, in other words, a dance which can exist only in film” (Legend 262). Both dance and cinema change, incorporating and reflexively responding to each other. John Martin, the New York Times dance critic, announces that Deren’s work reveals that the machine could now extend the body, labeling this “chorecinema.” Another dance critic, Richard Lippold, argues her work “liberates” dance from a “transitory experience,” offering it “the eternity of other arts, and the liberation of cinema, through the dancer, from its confines in documenting merely the real” (391).
 
The film spans approximately three minutes, deploying a number of devices to facilitate the production of temporality and movement: a machinic vision, if you will. Cadencing is integral to the structure of the movie. Dance movements and rhythms set the tempo for attention in the film, which moves through a number of discontinuous and idiosyncratic spaces in both geography and history. For example, the dancer starts in a forest and extends his leg. The extension is slow and continuous. This action is on-going while synchronously there is a jump cut between spaces, landing the dancer in a West Village apartment. Movement is shown continuously over spatial disjuncture. In another scene that takes place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the dancer traverses the antiquities hall. The speed of shooting is variable, ranging from 64 frames per second to 8 frames per second, as is the angle of the camera. The dancer’s turns maintain a set cadence, but they unfold for the viewer through disjointed perspectives–extreme close-ups and shallow depths of field interspersed with extended depth of field, wider angles, and distance–and at varying speeds. What the spectator is conscious of is the time in which the action unfolds since the spaces modulate. Deren also plays segments of the film in reverse to transform action and create jumps “contradicting gravity,” breaking with causal logics of action and reaction (“Choreography” 265).
 
Mechanical, perhaps statistical, in nature, the film induces a series of potential affects through tight structures and controlled scenarios. Nature and art–the urban museum, the domestic apartment, and the forest cliffs–are brought into contact as remnants of, and possibilities for, different forms of life, different possibilities for being that emerge from unlikely interactions structured by the film. Temporality is (at least in ambition) produced through the disjuncture between movement and space, directly from the cuts, edits and the variances in filming speed. Deren seeks not to represent time or presence, but rather to produce sensation through her editorial and structural practice. Deren sums up her ambitions for the film poetically: “I mean that movement, or energy, is more important, or more powerful, than space or matter-that, in fact, it creates matter” (qtd. in Butler 11).
 
In its dedication to enacting a deconstruction of the separation between materiality and abstraction, to an irreversible but heterogeneous temporality, and to memory as a process of “relation” building, this cinema appears to correlate with Gilles Deleuze’s later formulation of the time image as a post-war phenomenon. This correlation highlights a historical transformation in representational tactics. In a move that anticipates contemporary media theory, Deren inverts modern concerns with the present and the index, as exemplified in Henri Bergson’s attitudes and critiques of physics, modern science, and cinema. While Bergson continued to insist on the cinematograph’s attack on reality, Deren (and incidentally Bateson, but not Mead) represses this interest in the investment in a “filmic reality,” substituting the instrument for the position of memory. Unlike Bergson, for whom time is always outside of representation and inscription, and for whom the present is both inaccessible to legible inscription and the site of an absolute reality, for Deren time emerges from within the apparatus. In the post-war reformulation of cinema there is no debate between phenomenal, scientific, or mechanical experiences of time.⁹ The debate, instead, shifts to how this experience will be organized and manipulated.
 

Genealogies

 
Deren’s cinema thus allows us to identify three features of the post-war image: 1) The emergence of a notion of multiple temporality comprised of both probability and recombination. 2) The subsequent displacement of interest in the present, taxonomy, and static ontology in the interest of process, method, and relations. 3) The transformation in relations between materiality and abstraction facilitating a new treatment of perception, representation, and symbols. These three features are part of a broader cultural logic of representation endemic to the period. Deren’s relationship to temporality, traversing as it does discourses of physics, anthropology, memory, probability, and control, reflects and refract broader epistemological changes in the arts and sciences of her day and her particular biography. Deren, as I have noted, studied with Koffka at Smith College in the late 1930s while completing an MA. in English literature.
 
I draw attention to this link because gestalt psychology has a particular place in the postwar milieu. In fields as widespread as computing, art theory and history, psychology, and the social sciences, the language of gestalt and the ideas coming from this form of psychology become a dominant lingua franca for rethinking perception and human cognition. Deren’s thinking emerges directly from this influence, which reflects itself in her language of recombining “wholes,” in her idea that the anagram can be a process for creating perception, and her situating the structure of temporality in the image. By tracing Deren’s relationship to gestalt, I seek to situate the filmmaker within a broader history of epistemology and representation.
 
Gestalt psychology is a paradigmatic example of an epistemological bridge between two orders of objectivity and truth before and after the war. Gestalt anticipates, before the war, a transformation in scientific ideals and the dispersion of psychological technologies into fields like design and art through the Bauhaus. But gestalt enjoys global popularity as a practice and discourse only after the war. ¹⁰ In gestalt, the principle is to model the interactions and relationships between objects. Max Wertheimer, founder of the gestalt school, demonstrates this epistemology in his discussion of “time forms” in music. He writes: “what is given me by the melody does not arise . . . as a secondary process from the sum of the pieces as such. Instead, what takes place in each single part already depends upon what the whole is” (qtd. in Green).¹¹ The form, like the anagram, anticipates or precedes its discrete elements. If we are to think of this visually, then the static and indexical image of the photograph that comprises the cinema is only secondary to the form or structure that conditions the possible relations between stills and spectators. Gestalt psychology is interested in these generative forms, not in describing discrete entities.
 
Gestalt psychology makes visible an epistemic shift, bridging the compartmentalizing and rationalizing experimental traditions emerging from psycho-physics with new concerns with consciousness, memory, and cognitive functioning. Beginning at the turn of the century, gestalt psychologists studied perception, or the organization of sensations, rather than direct stimulus response situations (Ash 1). Experimentally, gestalt psychologists focused on examining those places where subjects identify patterns or shapes that are not reducible to the elements of the stimulus. Their focus became the mediated relationship between subjects and the world, and not the direct relationship between external input and action. For example, the kind of visual phenomena gestalt psychologists were interested in is exemplified by the famous gestalt triangle Kanizsa used in 1955:
 

 

 

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Fig. 7.

The gestalt triangle.

 

Kurt Koffka, Deren’s mentor at Smith, was intrigued by the fact that experimental subjects “see” objects like the triangle even though there is no triangle “actually” there. Cinema, of course, is the classic exemplar of gestalt phenomena. In 1912 Wertheimer, with Koffka’s assistance, researched the way people see movement from stills. This phenomenon demonstrated to them the possibility of a gestalt that inherently structures the nature of vision. As in a film that shows no movement, here there is no direct stimulus impinging upon the eye. That the triangle appears to be there demonstrates for Koffka and other gestalt psychologists that perception and stimulus do not correspond one-to-one. The production of the image of a triangle, for gesalt psychologists, gestures to the existence of a process of cognition coordinating relations between stimuli. Cognition and perception become part of the same process, and the boundary between reception and processing is degraded. Perception is a process, not reducible to singular reflex arcs, but determined by complex and changing relations between the organism and the environment. This gestalt investment in “wholes” and in experience that exceeds stimuli is refracted in Deren’s figure of the Anagram, where the
cinema and the spectator together produce new perceptual possibilities.

 
Gestalt psychology, in being concerned with interaction and not merely with causal action, therefore relies on a probabilistic temporality–on the production of an ordered psyche out of a chaotic environment. Köhler argues, for example, that in complex systems there is “no reason why things should develop in the direction of order rather than chaos.” However, he adds, “chaos can be prevented, and order enforced, if proper controls are imposed upon acting factors.” He gives the example of factory machines that, while they conform to principles of physics, impose a form and order that “man, not nature, has provided.” His interest as psychologist is in unearthing orderly patterns of human perception that allow cognition and produce order. He does not view this is an objective process, an inalienable law as in the natural sciences, but rather as a subjective process that constrains chance and chaos by systematically reproducing the same effects in all human beings. So while Köhler concedes that science cannot know what “red” might denote to every individual, science can know the process of relations and of producing order in the mind. “Thus,” he writes, “we must try to find a kind of function which is orderly and yet not entirely constrained by either inherited or acquired arrangements” (62-3, 69).
 
Wertheimer coins a term for this process in 1914–Prägnanz–expressing the idea that all experienced structures always spontaneously assume the simplest arrangement possible under given conditions. This theory clearly invokes the second law of thermodynamics. As a science, gestalt emerges out of a concern for order–in nature and in society. Gestalt psychologists sought to define and explore the process by which perceptions are systematically organized and reach homeostatic equilibrium. Gestalt psychology sought not to unearth an absolute singular form or structure, but rather to isolate processes and relations that operate on similar principles while allowing for change, transformation, and the multiplicity and diversity–the subjectivity–of human experience.¹² I argue this makes gestalt part of a broader shift in epistemology visible in many sciences throughout the 20^th century–away from ontology and documentation and toward performativity, process, and prediction. The shift entails a redefinition of the scientific objective and, perhaps, of objectivity. Köhler argues in 1947 that there can be no separation between thought and the body, and all observations are fundamentally mediated by human perception: “About the organism, just as about other physical things, we know merely by a process of inference or construction. To the influence of other physical objects my organism responds with processes which establish the sensory world around me.” Rather than discover a non-sensory or extra-sensory world, gestalt psychology is interested in how we produce experience and in fact the “sensory world.” For gestaltists there is only an internal and self-referential world (Köhler 9).
 
In entering the “subjective” space of sensory and perceptual mediation, gestalt psychologists also rethink the older categories of materiality and abstraction, mind and body, and representation and action. Gestalt psychology asks about generalizable processes: how is it that all humans appear to view cinema as moving? What process synthesizes this experience? The question therefore is not about the disjuncture between what is seen and presumably what is “really” there, but about how reality, now understood as experience, comes into being at all. This search for a reflexive or subjective method for ordering sense also threatens to degrade older categorical separations between materiality and abstraction, mind and body, cognition, perception, and sensation, or action/behavior and thought (Köhler 9). Breakdowns potently visible in Deren’s gestalt inspired choreographies for the camera, for example.
 
Bateson also demonstrates this refocusing of scientific concern on “relations.” He writes that “[w]hen . . . it is realized that the recognition of Gestalten depends upon the formal relations among external events, then it is evident that thinking in terms of ‘things’ is secondary . . . all knowledge of external events is derived from the relationships between them” (Bateson and Ruesch 173). After the war, Bateson’s experimental and ethnographic work shifts to focus on the relationships between people and cultures, over and against defining any particular subjectivity or culture (Steps). It is, in fact, Bateson’s interest in anagrammatic structures that drives his investigations into both gestalt and game theory; and it is to his game theory and comparative ethnography that Deren responds in her letters to Bateson. For Bateson, games and gestalten share an epistemology. Both systems possess formal or methodological structures that generate a great variety of potential experiences. In his professional fields, such as communication science, cognitive science, and cybernetics, gestalt concepts are often used interchangeably with other logical and game-theoretical ideas. However, Bateson has reservations about games as well-particularly about the logic of prediction in games and the inability of rules to evolve–that he does not have about psychology. His reservations implicitly underpin Deren’s response to his lectures.
 
While a serious background of game theory is impossible here, it should be noted that games, like gestalt psychology, become increasingly important in post-war American culture. Perhaps the most notable incarnation of this importance is John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 classic, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Influencing everything from computing to cold war politics, the game became both a critical metaphor and a mode of operating in many fields. Deren refers to this new cultural condition directly through reference to foreign policy, atomic weapons, and technically induced genocide of her time. While it is unclear if she distinguishes between different scientific or technical endeavors since psychology, physics, play, and probability are all recombined at will in her work, she is very astute in making visible these fields’ parallel epistemic patterns. Replacing an understanding of the market as a space where actors respond to external prices (dead variables), game theory by, among others, Morgenstern and von Neumann, understands actors as responding to each other. Markets, as well as political situations, emerge from the relationships between the agents involved through feedback interactions. There is no exteriority to the game except perhaps its “rules,” the templates by which the future gets extrapolated. The situation emerging out of these protocols can generate great complexity.¹³ Like the concept of gestalt that is often used to describe them, games in game theory are generative forms produced out of a set of processes or rules that create future possibility. Because games generate their own self-referential worlds, these are not representations. Games, like the post-war images of cinema, are said to be performative abstractions that materialize particular effects.
 
But at the juncture between probabilistic time and predictive time, Bateson diagnoses a problem–games cannot evolve or change once begun. This repetition without change is the topic of the conversation between himself and Deren. He understands that the problem with “static” games is that they produce conditions for action, but not for different possible actions, only repetitive cycles culminating in potentially genocidal violence (nuclear war in this case)–he labels this a “paranoidal direction.” I would label it the logical and rational basis of irrationality and psychosis. These games, models, and approximations both assume the collapse of the perceptual field, a state of total psychosis and internal self-reference, and still desire the ability to gain control, to reassert objectivity–an impossible combination. Bateson also labels this situation “schizoid,” and goes on to redefine the pathology of schizophrenia as an impossible scenario where two incompatible logics compete. This tension at the heart of theories of games is, in fact, at the center of Bateson’s critique (Letter 2).
 
Temporality also structures Deren’s response to the series of lectures Bateson gives linking game theory, nascent cybernetic concepts, and new models for ethnography and psychology.¹⁴ She documents a “heated” discussion with Gregory about “that old business of his linear analysis of nonlinear systems” (“Notebook” 25). She argues that his “dominance-submission, succor-dependence structure is wrong. That is, he builds up a whole structure of feedbacks, etc., because he starts off with such a linear, simplified process . . . It is better to complicate the premise by one dimension–time–and have a simple analytical structure flow from it than to keep the premise simple at any price only to have a very complex superstructure” (“Notebook” 25-26). Her concern with feedbacks and processes demonstrates her exposure to the language of computation, electrical engineering, and the cognitive sciences that are Bateson’s points of reference. And while her understanding of Bateson’s project may be limited, her personal notes identify a problem with the rigidity and linearity of his basic rules or premises and their incapacity to generate more complex systems and unknown futures. Deren maintains that the whole should be more than its parts. Systems are never reducible to their identifiable parts. Systems are never fully legible (“Notebook” 25-26).
 

The Organization of Time

 
If I have insisted on situating Deren within this broader history of epistemology and representation it is, of course, to facilitate a reflexive encounter with the present. Situating our own practices takes particular valence within this context where probability, temporal variability, and emergence become the very technical substrate not only for art and philosophy, but also for communication and game theory, cybernetics, gestalt and cognitive sciences. History, here, becomes theory, quite literally. In systems where the past is always being used to predict the future, as in games, the possibility of emergence is always in question. Games can make automatic repetition into technology.
 
Repetition and automation preoccupy Deren in her writing to and about Bateson. What Deren discovers in his lecture, and in her review of Mead and Bateson’s film footage, is a productive tension between form and content. While Bateson critiques game theory in his lectures and persistently attacks the authorial voice of anthropology, his form–a language of distanciation, linear and repetitive interaction, generic and de-contextualized models–is nostalgic and archival. It is a language of objectivity arriving from an earlier moment in anthropology, a language associated with the archival and objective epistemologies of another age. A language of statistics and mechanism. This language, Deren argues, undermines his ethical effort to rethink game theory. Deren notes that Bateson is trapped in a feedback loop; one that he, himself, fails to recognize. She argues that he is dedicated to maintaining a reductive premise, “a linear, simplified process,” even when describing a complex system (“Notebook” 25). His need to isolate a generic and global process of cultural conflict forces reductivism in thought. Implicitly, she senses that Bateson, despite his own interest in complexity, falls prey to the same problems of game theory in his dedication to unearthing, and authoritatively describing, generic processes governing human cultures. She feels he is creating models no more dynamic or changeable than those of games (“Notebook” 25-26).
 
Deren seizes upon an internal temporal disjuncture that structures both game theories and gestalt psychologies–between the production of probabilities and the desire to contain chance and reassert older ideals of authority. For example, this temporal disjuncture historically plays out in gestalt psychology through an inbuilt tension between universal and cultural explanations of cognition and perception. While gestaltists (and game theorists) reconfigure objectivity as emanating from within experience rather than outside of it, as a science they still sought to disciplinarize and to impose a singular logic and rigorous method for psychological investigation. Gestalt, as the historian Mitchell Ash notes, “was not only, or not simply, a revolt against positivism” (3). Gestalt is haunted by the ghost of previous histories of evidence, rationality, positivism, and objectivity. We all, apparently, see cinematic movement and triangles even if we know that cinema is made of stills. The emerging moral and ethical question is: What do we make of this generalization applicable to “all” humans? Perception organized into homeostatic equilibrium as a rule. While gestalt demonstrates that perception and cognition can be trained, influenced, and reproduced, there is also the possibility that this is a perception defined as naturalized, a-historical, culturally non-specific and, perhaps, as later debates demonstrate, biologically ordained. Gestalt psychologists create new boundaries between nature and culture, objectivity and subjectivity, and perception, sensation, and cognition, but struggle with the normative terms set by modern psychological and biological projects for truth. Even if they debate the place of nature and nurture, learning or innateness, in developing gestalt forms, the terms of the debate are fundamentally normative and disciplinary. Gestalt psychology hybridizes two forms of discourse.¹⁵
 
This disjuncture, in the post-war period, between chance and determinism debates the significance of authority or “control,” a term that binds Deren to Bateson, both pragmatically in that she wants to get a Guggenheim and be authorized by scientists and anthropologists, and conceptually because it is a site in which to negotiate a new separation between art and science. Deren herself regularly deploys this term in labeling her cinema a “controlled accident” (“Cinematography”). Control is indeed an internally inconsistent term at this moment (and perhaps even in our moment) of history. In game theory, and in the post-war discourse of gestalt, control is a double figure–both the condition of possibility for emergence, and the ideal of an authoritative account of future action. Game theory, especially, hopes that the models, templates, and approximations that produce the system can simultaneously analyze it. In game theory perception, cognition, and analysis are all the same. The game is both representative and predictive. Control is the function that temporally organizes the process of game play. But control can also mean perfect prediction, the production of a future that replicates past data. The problem, as Bateson says–and as Deren is quick to affirm in her comment that “time perspective” defines “man,” allowing him to “build machines” and act “idiosyncratically”–is that in game theory the rules are static. Rules cannot change within the game, and the players cannot learn.¹⁶ Time, for Deren, is destroyed when the model and the world become one. Game theories use past data to predict the future, but the new political and ethical concern is that the technology obscures the fact that while we are always predicting different futures, we do so according to the same form or operation. Deren is worried that Bateson, in his reformulation of psychology and culture through game and communication theory, enacts the very problem he is describing.
 
Whether I do or do not agree with Deren’s appraisal of this particular lecture (Bateson is hardly an ethnographer dedicated to authority or objectivity), she highlights an important point. Ethical concerns in gaming and art, I argue through Deren, now do not merely concern the manipulation of time, but also the specific organization of time. In Deren’s discourse, art is classified not by telling topical or technical concerns apart–artists use new technologies and mediums, they speak to science–but by organizing them according to their different temporal organizations. More importantly, for Deren only particular forms of practice, now labeled art, allow us to recognize and experience time’s movements and passage consciously. The emerging question Deren’s work poses is: how will time be organized, now that its teleological operations are unmoored and history is available for recombination? Her work also asks: what does it mean for time to enter the realm of experience and consciousness? For while she adheres to the possibility of a subject capable of change, she wavers between the desire for a psychotic perception and the need to differentiate between entities within the field of perception.
 
Deren is very explicit about consciousness. She violently resists the shock and unconscious automatism of Surrealism, for example. She always denies the possibility that her work expresses the unconscious. She considers her films the result of a “controlled accident,” of an intentional experiment that produces chance, and not of a time and fate outside of subjective control. Time, for Deren, unlike for Bergson, emerges from within a system. It is subject to control. Time is produced by the artist through the cinematic practice. Time is not bought into representation; it emerges from purposefully produced aesthetic structures. It appears that Deren harbors her own personal archive of a never-realized dream of sovereignty and agency that she explicitly seeks to see, finally realized, through the cinematic medium (“Cinema” 29-31). In Deren’s discourse memory becomes central to the project of making time experienced. It is, however, a memory infected, like Bateson’s “linear analysis” by problems of storage and archiving. The fate of this archive, the archive of older forms of storage and knowledge, the archive of images and their taxonomies, the archive as itself an historically specific form of storage inherent in the cinema and to 19^th century anthropology and psychology, is now unclear. Deren wants to break from a history of objectivity and ontology, those orders affiliated with the 19^th century archive, but at the same time she desires to preserve memory and the trace of indexicality, maybe history and context. She wants time to feedback into the image, but she does not want us to identify this time as known and controllable, but rather as alien and outside of legibility.¹⁷
 
Memory takes a complex place in this discourse as the site that both produces time and refuses identification. Deren defines memory very particularly as reconfiguring the index in time. She offers two axes for memory–horizontal and vertical. Deren writes:
 

By “horizontal” I mean that the memory of man is not committed to the natural chronology of his experience . . . On the contrary, he has access to all his experience simultaneously . . . he can compare similar portions of events widely disparate in time and place . . . and he is able to perceive that a natural, chronological whole is not immutable, but that it is a dynamic relationship of functioning parts.
 

(“Cinema” 11)

What art must utilize and preserve, she argues, is not the direct index, but rather this “horizontal” memory, which can produce new relations between times rather than organize time in one direction. This is not a linear memory, even as it can facilitate change. This is also not a memory based on an archive of static, spatial representations. Rather, this memory bank is relational. Deren wishes to evoke the relationships between subjects, and between subjectivity, perception, and cinema.

 
Two temporal vectors operate in this discourse. On the one hand, Deren assumes the availability of an infinite and recombinant storage space for manipulation, and on the other, she seeks not to return to any single element within this storage system, but always to focus on totalities (gestalten) that exceed individual elements. She dreams of a memory-storage system operating in internally referential feedback loops, one that produces new relations between historical events and “functioning parts.” In this, Deren reflects much of what I have already argued in this article about an historical shift in favor of the record and of process. Two times operate simultaneously in her work–repetitive feedback and an irreversible teleology.
 
Deren’s most complex film, Ritual in Transfigured Time, interrogates this relationship between cinema and time. The filmmaker, however, counter to her interlocutors in psychology and anthropology, strenuously insists on reattaching these two temporal vectors of feedback and probability to history and subjectivity. Deren insists on reminding us both of the memorializing and indexical functions of the photograph embedded within the cinema, and of the historically changing, situated, and contested structure of visuality. The film adamantly maintains a memory of the index, but only in order to rethink the nature of subjectivity and visuality in the future. The film, not incidentally, is completed in 1946, when Deren begins to engage with Bateson and Mead. While most film criticism has highlighted the movie’s focus on ritual and ethnography,¹⁸ I argue that this film highlights Deren’s alternative idea of games and images. It is also, in many ways, a synthesis of an on-going process. Deren is not a filmmaker whose project can be comprehended in any one film, or text, or lecture, but rather is about the on-going relations between all these sites. In many senses, her films, themselves, are merely traces of another process, one that can never be fully defined, or seen. In this final moment in this essay, I want to use this film to feed-back into all that I have already discussed in her work.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 8.

Stills from Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
Deren’s early script of Ritual in Transfigured Time describes a transformation in time, a metamorphosis (Legend 453). “Slow motion is the microscope of time,” Deren writes. And under this microscope, at its end, the “Fourth dimension is you.” The ritual will end and the protagonist (played by a young Afro-Caribbean dancer, Rita Christiani) will finally become Other, changing places with a character played by Deren. She will move away from death to life, changing from a “widow” to a “bride.” History will reverse itself to embrace, in Deren’s terms, “life.” This is a film about “change of identity…and sudden change in stature of relationship” (“Pre-production Notes” 466). Her opening description of the film anticipates that time will be involved in the production of a new form of inter-subjectivity or “relationship” between the fixity of identity and the “metamorphosis” of becoming a subject.
 
In keeping with her anagrammatic practice, Deren’s production notes dissect the movie into seven segments, laying out every shot and movement. This is a movie pre-planned in every detail, but one she still hopes will induce the “controlled accident.” Each scene feeds back into previous one through the repetition of gesture and figure. The movie opens with a series of shots in a room, where our two protaganists–Deren and the dancer Rita Christiani–first encounter each other. They are watched by a third figure–Anäis Nin–a figure who reappears as a third eye throughout the film. By watching, she duplicates the viewer in the film, but we are never allowed access to her perspective. She is thus a site of the limit of visibility in the structure of the film. Nin occupies the place of a witness, perhaps to historical change and to the limits of describing or knowing this process. Already from the first scene, therefore, Deren emphasizes the problem of seeing and recording the past.
 
In this room, Deren is playing with yarn, creating a cat’s cradle, as reference to children’s games and to myth and ritual action. These are practices that are untimely, arriving from elsewhere, but also practices that mediate the interaction between subjects. As the scene progresses, the tempo becomes ever slower and Deren’s movement’s more dramatized, until the yarn flies off, and with a cinema cut we are thrust into another room full of people. No sooner are we offered a series of figures with which to potentially identify, than this alignment between our vision and the camera is disrupted through the cut and the manipulation of the time of events in the film. A series of shots tracks Christiani’s outstretched hand as she approaches the figure who is weaving. The two women never touch, so that our phenomenal expectations of an encounter are never answered. In this failure of events, however, to culminate in rational action, we are also left to wonder at the potential future of these figures. We are, thus, not allowed to establish who these women are, nor what their specific relationship to each other might be. Deren refuses us as spectators access to the present, so we cannot render these subjects into static objects. Nor are we offered solace in cinematic convention, since the abruptness of the edit between one room and another is jarring and unexpected.
 
The cut into the “second” scene comes through the tracking of this figure–Christiani–and maintains a relationship to interior space, but the room is now different. In this scene, the protagonist (Christiani) enters the room as a bride (perhaps of Christ) in black (see Fig. 9 below). The camera cuts to a partial view of a room seemingly full of men in suits and women in dark dresses and dark lipstick. It appears to be a party. We are never offered an establishing shot, and we are never sure if our viewpoint coincides with that of the protagonist. We are thus refused any commanding sense of where or when this event is happening. There is a cut back to the “bride.” She removes a veil from her head and enters the room. With this gesture she is transformed into another member of the partying group. Bereft of veil and cross, she is another woman in a dark dress.
 

 

 

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Fig. 9.

The “bride” in Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
But the camera tracks her differently, offering her the intimacy of the close up, focusing on her facial expression. As viewers, we register on the protagonist’s face the search for the other woman she initially encountered in a game. Christiani is among the only individuals (the other in this scene is Nin) whom we actually recognize. She is the only figure to look at the camera directly. She is also, of course, racially marked, as the black woman in the party. Her skin color is not what identifies her. The movie is black and white, there is no sound, her skin is not truly visible. Rather, we identify her though differences in her hairstyle, gesture, and lack of make-up. She is the only individual in a mass of mechanically moving and similarly dressed and made up people.
 
Deren’s noteworthy move here is to make difference appears equivalent to gesture. Both the normative social actions and the movements that separate and differentiate subjects are no longer representative, but performative. Not only does gesture comprise the terrain of visuality, but it is also rendered equivalent to the technology of cinematic manufacture. It is the choreography of gesture that edits this movie, producing perception. Difference, the very gestural interactions between the figures, is the technology that makes this cinema–just as in gestalt it is the relations between objects–the very process of perception, that produces cognition. The logic of the performative sign also governs Deren’s anagrammatic figure and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). Representation thus only enters in delay, as the spectator retroactively recognizes, and assigns meaning to, the performative and historical nature of vision. Only through this feedback loop where gestural conventions are returned to us after temporal delay do we become conscious of how and who we see. From the beginning of this movie, therefore, we are made mindful of the historical nature of vision. We recognize both the ability to perceive difference and the conventions that make us look. The party is a dramatization of social norms fed-back to us through the cinema.
 
The next series of shots, however, reveals that the movie will not allow us to fully identify and classify either historical norms or difference. The camera zooms out, and we start to see movement. The party is a dance, a pas de deux between people meeting and greeting each other. We are offered mid-length shots capturing the upper-bodies and hands of these “dancers” greeting each other. The moments of greeting are continually repeated. These repetitions, however, are interspersed with two forms of cutting. On the one hand there are sudden moments of stillness–photographs. People caught in indefinite poses, in almost, but never completed, greetings. On the other hand, we are regularly offered shots of Christiani and Nin encountering each other. The camera focuses on their faces, affording us the ability to witness their moment of almost-recognition. I say “almost” because the facial expression assumes some familiarity on our part, but without a defined emotion or identification. Neither looks at the camera; they are caught to the side. The look they give each other is more a glance than a gaze.
 
As the two women encounter each other, their gestures are so slow as to allow us to see their eyes momentarily meet, and to note the gesture of their bodies. Each time they meet, their interaction subtly changes, becoming slightly elongated. Theirs is the only relationship that appears to progress. The protagonist’s movement across the room is a linear counterpoint to the empty and repeated performances of sociality that do not engage in recognition even as they are identifiable.
 
Here both time and cinematic convention are made visible. The photographic still elongates time and serves as a referent to photography, a reminder that the cinema carries within it the memory of the ontology and indexicality of photography. The images are also among the most historically situated in the film, depicting the social dress and manners of a party in the mid-1940s in a New York apartment. But not exactly. These images are not really indexes; they are referents to indexicality itself. The photograph refuses to serve as an index because its function is merely to make us conscious of perception itself. By stopping movements from commencing and cutting into the sensory-motor chain, the photograph forces us to recognize the very conventions of visuality, just as the repetition of social codes forces historical recognition of normativity. Two temporal vectors develop–the circular repetition of individuals greeting each other and the linear and diegetic search for the Other–which mirror the historical memory of the index against the tightly choreographed movement of the film.
 
At the final moment of this scene there is another cut. Through a pose, the space of the party is transformed into another: we enter a third space or “scene,” although neither term is appropriate. At the final moment of the party Christiani enters a close-up with a man (Frank Westerbrook). They appear about to engage in a kiss, or perhaps an assault (see Fig. 10 below). The situation is rendered ambiguously in that the woman’s face is turned away. The camera holds still. It is almost a photographic still, although not quite–the freeze frame does not last long enough, and the animation of the dancers is not entirely stopped. Through the wavering of this moment of potentiality in interaction between desire and violence, there is an immediate cut to almost the same pose, now in a garden filled with Greco-Roman statues, a space where monument and memory collapse. Deren thus makes explicit the relationship between ideal forms and historical change.
 

 

 

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Fig. 10.

Stills from the third “scene” of Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
We are never permitted, however, to dwell on the monumental and ideal facet of this environment. The forms of sexual perfection and idealized body encoded within the Greco-Roman aesthetic do not enact themselves in the sexual act. For immediately upon entry into this space, the potentially sexual act of encounter in a kiss (or assault) generates a different form of action (see the figures above). The scene immediately cuts to three women from the party, dancing in a circle. A cut doubly referencing the lingering trace of social convention that enters this dream-like space from the previous scene, and an ode to ritual enactment and game. This is the pattern that repeats in all the scenes. Both myth and history are continually reintroduced through repetitive forms of games.
 
From a brief series of shots showing the women, we are thrust back to the couple. Their kiss does not end. Rather, the dancer lurches into the air. We track her arms in a circle, the camera shot is beneath her, then the camera shifts idiosyncratically to another viewpoint, perhaps that of the male dancer. But not quite, because we see the back of his shoulder and his extended arm, framing her movements, perhaps threatening her body as she twists on the ground. The camera is angled and the movements deployed in slower motion so that the actual reverberations of the fall and the quivering of her muscles are visible, offering a very embodied sense to the image. There is a cut back to three women in the background dancing in a circle, as though around a maypole, or playing “ring around the rosy.” The segment vacillates between these two sites of action–the couple and the triad of women. The maypole circle repeats until the dancers fly off as the couple continues in their athletic, or perhaps, violent movements. We are offered scenes in this dance that are almost mimetic of Leni Riefensthal’s Triumph of the Will (1935), as the male dancer’s naked body is filmed against Grecian columns:
 

 

 

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Fig. 11.

Frank Westerbrook in Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
Ideals of body and history play against the incoherence of a film where there is no clear identification of who these individuals are, or what their ambitions might be.
 
All the figures finally fling apart and recombine. The male dancer joins the circle game, as the protagonist continues her search. Repeatedly one action after another gets strung into another set of motions. The male and female dancers appear caught in a repetitive game of chasing one another. The women in the circle repeat another history. The repetition of a circular dance is associated with death, ritual, the plague, a longue durée in history against the speedy and constantly changing flight and fight of this couple dancing and chasing each other. Deren interjects photographic stills in the garden scene at precisely those moments of choreographic velocity when bodies fling apart, and we assume certain linear laws of Newtonian physics to take hold. Our expectations are thwarted. For example, at one moment a woman is flung out of the circle. Her body has no structured pose and shows no intent. At another moment (see Fig. 12 below) the male dancer suddenly leaps out of a statuesque pose to pursue the protagonist. This leap, however, occurs at almost the wrong moment for such still capture. Unlike the statuesque pose preceding it, this is not a defined or clear action. It is neither monumental nor memorial. It is undefined. It is a moment of preservation that does not show historical intentionality or identificatory power as an action.
 

 

 

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Fig. 12.

Garden Chase Sequence, Ritual in Transfigured Time. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
These photographic images are images of potentiality and illegibility. They offer a memorial counterpoint to the moving images unfolding in the present. These moments of stasis interrupt action, depicting actions that fail to finalize and are therefore indecipherable in intent or purpose. These images convey supplemental and excessive gestures. These are images that carry within them not the index as an authority over the past, but an index of the very practice of media and the process by which history is narrativized. They make the nature of the medium visible, thus disrupting cinema’s own omniscience as a time-based and animated medium, and reminding the very machine of its own history and internal resistances.
 
Deren makes us aware that mythic cinematic and social forms are unattainable ideals. The greetings photographed in the film are too theatrical and dramatized, too sudden or disrupted to be truly identifiable as normal behavior or as part of a causal story line. The choreographed movement, intercut with stills, is marginally familiar. We become conscious that it is familiar, but also see it as uncanny. Deren forces us to look in a new manner at the mundane and everyday practices of sociality. We are forced to see acts of expression and excess. We are forced to recognize the forms that constrain and produce our actions. Finally, we are made conscious of the mediums–of technical media, of society–that structure our very movements. These images are reminders of the technical forms through which cinema provides purpose and linearity where none exist. In this moment of cinematic re-memory, all the times are rearranged, and the viewer and the camera both “fail” to achieve a command over the time or space of the film. These are images, therefore, that operate like Deren’s memory–not to stop time and organize it but to make visible relationships between subjects. These images make the production of time, itself, available to perception.
 
There are two temporal movements, therefore, in the film: the repetitive actions of these social, encoded, and gendered games replayed in the visceral actions of the dancers, and the linear diegetic narrative of search and transformation. These two vectors are embedded in two cinematic actions–the recombination of film’s own history and the production of new relations between images. These two directions cut into each other, both repeating themselves but never culminating. These vectors emerge from a cinema structured on gestalt forms. If visuality is on display, it is already embedded in the film notes and in Deren’s anagrammatic schemas. Deren wants to make perception, itself, a techne. Yet out of this structure she seeks to create accidents. A whole beyond the sum of its parts. For this reason, perhaps, the movie insists on repetition–of choreographed movements, of cinematic convention, of mediums. Deren continues this mode as the movie moves through new geographies, culminating in a moment of inter-subjective transformation where Deren and Christiani become each other.
 
This ending culminates in multiple possibilities as an action of inter-subjective substitution whose effects and signification have multiple interpretations. As Ute Holl argues, “Emotions are artificially, almost mathematically, produced by technical devices” in a film that is “constructing and transforming subjects,” but never depicting them, a film that Holl suggests produces subjectivity from without through this mathematical logic (157). This is a film that produces psychology as an external medium, thus denigrating the sutured subject, while continuing to affirm the possibility of differentiation and subject production. This film operates like the anagrammatic and gestalt logic that underpins its making.
 
But, Deren refuses gestalt’s effort to recuperate the authority of science. Rather, she produces an image that pushes the past towards the future, but does not ontologically describe or define the subject in the present. In this film the action never stops, and there is no finality or culmination to the movie. We might believe that the loop by which the women switch places would be replicated, just as the movie endlessly replays the same cinematic devices, recovering an endless archive of forms, from parties to dances, to move us through spaces familiar, yet transformed, through their associations.
 

Failure to Feedback

 
Structure and emergence must recombine. Deren in a series of untitled notes to the movie writes that, “Cubism of event–we do not recognize what is occurring–over and over we fail” (“Pre-production Notes” 468). How do we understand this idea of a “failure” to depict or identify the subject in relation to time? I argue that Deren deploys a series of cinematic conventions in order to create a fissure between the index of the past and the future.
 
This failure to identify emerges from the relationship between the technical substrate of the medium and its own archive of conventions, mirrored by the subjective time of performance and sociality. At the level of convention, the film is about the archive of cinema itself: making visible, through re-performance, conventions of editing, photography, cinematography, camera work, and recording speeds. The repetitions are also choreographic, embedded in the structure of “games” such as greeting rituals at parties and children’s dances. The games and the repetitive cinematic conventions literally mime a repetition without difference. It is the technological repetition of media, and the subjective repetition of sociality rendered equivalent. This repetition is dissected, however, by the very forward flow of another choreography that is about chance and change.
 
The multiple times emerging from the film make the spectator recognize both media and history. On one hand this focus on cadence, editing, and non-linear operations reveals the specific nature of the filmic medium. Film’s own timeliness and sense of time. On the other hand the viewer begins to become conscious of history–specific rituals, specific times and places, specific forms of cinema, but also specific and codified ideals of social norms, gendered interaction, and bodies. If there is a technology made visible in this film it is that of the process of social codification and formalization. The very process of ritual is rendered technical and representable here. It is not, however, one particular ritual that is depicted in this movie, but the entire process of rituals, particularly those of Cold War American sociality.
 
But these recognitions of the processes by which we come into being are not identifications. We are offered traces of a history of normativity. The image is of a memory of the process of subjectivization. We are never offered the direct index–the image of the subject as an object. Nor is this historical specificity ever defined. Rather it is merely produced as a possibility. The viewers must project their individual understanding of time and place upon the film. It is the viewer who must bring the scenes, in delay, into representation through a process of projection. The result might be an “accident”; Deren hopes it will generate a new form of future that does not repeat the past. This inability to return is pronounced if we think about this film within Deren’s oeuvre. The filmmaker continually moves between mediums, replaying these cinematic conventions in her cinema theory, recycling her own aesthetic conventions in all her films. No one piece of her work, therefore, stands alone as an object. No one element of her work is ever finished.
 
Neither the awareness of the medium nor of history is therefore permitted to complete. We cannot return; the feedback loop fails to finish or finalize. Unlike the theories of Bateson, or the return of the objective voice, Deren “fails” to go back to any set ideal or to fully allow us to identify those other histories–either of the cinema, or of the society–that she documents. This failure allows temporal multiplicity to enter, but defers any ability to gain authority over the past, or the individuals within it. The multiplicity of times forces an opening that does not allow a return to static and nostalgic ideals of subjectivity.
 
This filmmaking, I argue, ethically activates all that I have discussed in this essay about the post-war displacement of ontology for process, the availability of the index for manipulation, and the communicative obsession with prediction and emergence. Deren must deal with feedback and with change simultaneously. By making these two times available synchronously, Deren, I argue, opens up the possibility of other modes of being. Consciousness, perhaps subjectivity, in her cinema lies within this gap between prediction and return.
 
Deren holds a mirror to the theories of communication and control, and recognizes that it is precisely a multiplicity of communicative situations, always a question of history, situation, and time, that allows subjective agency. She writes in her notebooks that she might have misunderstood Bateson’s talk. But what she does understand is that Bateson is enacting a scientific discourse, performing a discussion that wrenches the specificity of Bali out of its context, and makes it amenable to comparison with Von Neumann’s games, and with the behaviors of other tribes–policy makers, communication scientists, curators at museums. Intuitively, she understands that this emergent model of image and communication is productive and that it is a site both of danger and of possibility. For this process, now unmoored, is amenable to any manipulation.
 
When Mead and Bateson were in Bali they sought to find the expression of the interior mind of the native in the gesture of the body. Unable to speak any language of the region, skeptical of their translators, they turned away from translation and representation in written language. Instead, they created a recording machine. They wanted to capture everything. They filmed miles of stills. In the course of this study, the search for difference metamorphosed into an archive of performative inscriptions and gestures from which a new practice of cinema, and anthropology, then emerged. Both anthropologists used this research to develop cybernetic theories of mind and human development after the war (Bateson and Mead, “Introduction,” Balinese). The result was the elimination of situation, context, and history, a pure process extracted from any phenomenal time. Difference turned into a technology of communication and performance. On one hand this is an opening…an abandonment of the normative strictures of a previous eras’ Oedipal situations and essential biologies. A release from discipline. There are no objects here for study. There are no clear boundaries to demarcate human difference. But there are new technocratic orders. For the emergent computational and psychological orders often destroyed multiplicity and time in the name of multiplicity and time, simultaneously calling for the possibility of difference in communicative situations and creating processes so perfectly interchangeable and convergent that such multiplicity ceases to exist. The artist, in turn, seeks to return these processes to lived time, to memory, to the specificity of different forms of being and living. She still aspires to produce meaning, not merely messages. She hopes that the memory trace of consciousness, and humanism, might yet inform this condition.
 
Perhaps this engagement between art and science allows us to transform our own thinking. We experience a shock of recognition, since so much emanating from these new cinemas and technologies that emerge after the war animates our contemporary theorization and discourse of the image. The question about time and the image is not, however, whether the time image is the digital image, or whether the desire for cinema is now a form of nostalgia. Rather, it opens to a series of questions about how we want time to be organized in our systems. In a world of infinite archives, feedback loops, performative epistemologies, and predictive times, we might ask, instead, what work it does to return to a memory of a medium or a subject? Which memory traces do we wish to activate? And to what effects?
 
We may also ask what is at stake in the relationship between art, science, and technology. Do we want these three to collapse, or do we desire differentiation in practices and goals? Ultimately, the concerns about game theories and histories of objectivity and subjectivity are also competing imaginaries about the relationship between technology, repetition, and imagination. It is not whether Deren’s vision is better than that of gestalt psychology or anthropology, but rather what is lost if we fail to maintain any separation between these three forms of knowing and being in the world… if anything. In the interaction between film, science, and the technology of games after the war something is made visible–the production of radically different forms of visuality and perception, and perhaps even life, from the same material substrate. Despite sharing the same episteme with her interlocutors, Deren crafts films that produce very different effects in the world than psychological theories or game theories. I argue she produces a form of desire that has not yet been formalized as technology.
 
I am returned to Bateson. He is, after all, prominently remembered for formulating a new definition of difference in terms of information, thereby revising modern anthropological formulations of both otherness and time. He argues that information is “any difference that makes a difference to a conscious, human mind.” In his summation, data can come from anywhere (either within or outside the mind) and information does not need to be meaningful it must merely be effective. Communication is, therefore, about effects and behavior. Consciousness is also revised, perhaps separated forever from a relationship to “spirit;” in Bateson’s formulation, to be conscious is merely to be able to take different paths of action, it is not to be separated from the external world. Most importantly, for Bateson difference is non-ontological, but rather processional and the result of interactions. Difference is always relative and relational. If difference is defined by information, and information is a measure of potential states or actions a system can take, then difference is also always already defined as emergent, a state and not a static object (Steps 459).
 
Deren responds indirectly by asking whether this might not be an automation of emergence or difference itself. She marks a moment in which the site that allows us to think differentiation moves away from ontological categorization to the very structure of communication channels. Change is made static no longer through a mechanical process of rationalizing time, but through a discourse that insists on emergence. It is to this possibility that our contemporary thought must answer. In her cinema, the filmmaker suggests, perhaps not all differences can be rendered equivalent through this model of information. Perhaps, Deren suggests, one can produce images that can contain forms of non-equivalent encounter, differences that are neither static nor immediately amenable to transmission and circulation into any other medium. What is an image of difference that can still produce meaning or signification–dare I still say representation? A difference that is no longer only a difference, but can organize affect and gesture into signification. This difference comes through a very particular organization of temporal multiplicity. It is immanent. Perhaps this is what Deren would call art.
 
There is much at stake, therefore, in this renegotiation of bodies and images, time and otherness, all on the screen. For this dream of an image that can still confront the Other with love, that can open to a world that is not yet known… has not yet been realized.
 

 

 

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Fig. 13.

Becoming Other. Rita Christiani and Maya Deren in transformation in Ritual in Transfigured Time. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

All I ask is that you remember me in the good times we had… Keep me close to your heart… Friends forever.
 
Pass this on to all your friends… If I get it back… I know you care.
 
(To a very special friend I have made on here.)
 

– Facebook spam

Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk. Do not keep this message.
 

— Hsia Yü, Pink Noise

 
In Taiwan, a perfectly faked LV bag hits the night markets before its original copy is officially launched in flagship stores. If a fake LV product cannot be easily equated with postmodern kitsch, as critic Chang Hsiao-hung points out, it also defies analysis as postcolonial mimesis. Chang argues that the fakery of the “digital copy,” instead of being the antithesis of the “official/original” product, marks the multilayered cultural transference that translates the two global/imperial forces–“European superlogos, Japanese nostalgia”–into a decentralizing force that implodes globalization from within (227). Interestingly, in the course of Chang’s analysis, theory itself becomes the “European superlogo” that can be appropriated or counterfeited, as she aptly “translates” Derrida’s “logocentrism” into “glogocentrism” (the “glocalization” of western logos) and his “dissemination” into “fake dissemi-Nation” (the decentralizing force of the fake). Because translation is fundamentally the primal scene of such affective transference–of love–in the age of global connectivity, it can no longer be written off as a para-narrative, the mirror discourse that privileges the original; rather, through the “fake dissemination” of translation, western imports, ideas, and ideals–such as postmodernism–get a new life in the age of post-national and posthuman global deterritorialization.
 
The long-standing criticism of Hsia Yü,¹ Taiwan’s most renowned postmodern poet since her self-published poetry collection Memoranda (備忘錄) in 1984, therefore needs to be rethought in a framework of critical comparativism that does not end with a celebration of her so-called “endless relays of signifiers and signifiers” as the emblem of Taiwan’s postmodernism (Lin 135), but instead takes postmodernism as an object of translation to investigate the process of re-lating and trans-lating as the primal scene of cultural transference.²
 
Such is the promise of the new collection, Pink Noise/粉紅色噪音,a transparent book of English/French poems, drawn largely from the Internet, together with Chinese “translations.” The book is made (manually!) of transparencies, challenging the hegemony of print culture–a design that allegorizes the role of the Internet in contemporary culture. There are thirty-two English poems and one French poem, each with a Chinese “translation.” The book’s language is at first glance that of (post-)modernist defamiliarization, radicalized by its ostensibly parallel poems. Yet both the English/French “originals” (printed in black) and their Chinese “translations” (in pink) are counterfeits: the Western poems are patchworks of lines drawn from a host of sources–from blogs, ads, websites, spam emails, and Baudelaire poems–while the Chinese poems are machinic translations done “mindlessly” by the computer program, Sherlock. In its unique form and with its primary medium of the Machine, Pink Noise seems to shout out postmodernism, as many of Hsia Yü’s fans immediately propose. Their exclusive attention to the formal aspect of the book is understandable; after all, both of Hsia Yü’s previous works, Ventriloquy (腹語術; 1991) and •Rub•Ineffable (●摩擦●無以名狀; 1995), deal with the “materiality of language,” with the former featuring invented Chinese characters, further radicalized by the latter’s “remix” of sentences fragmented and re-assembled from the former. Yet I want to argue that we can read the form and narrative of Pink Noise as the realistic representations of the transformed and transforming public sphere of cybernetic conviviality. Not only is the Machine doubled in this work, but it also doubles the dialectics of two languages into a poetic of translation–a dialogic of love. Hsia Yü makes the Western poems by sending sentences drawn from different sources repeatedly to “Sherlock” until a Chinese translation passes as poetry. The title of poem #25, “They’re back/ they’re sad/ they’re making a porn movie,” for example, is drawn from three different sources. In the collection, therefore, humanity meets/mates–instead of battles–with the Machine. The romantic overtone becomes the harbinger of interspecies and interlingual connections in general. In an interview, Hsia Yü explains that she was “listening to all these great noise and low-frequency acoustic art CDs, and wondering what would result if that concept were applied to words” when she accidentally bumped into the spam translation program.³ The ‘chance encounter,’ or rather, a fling, diverts the planned trajectory toward an unexpected destiny: the white noise that the author strives for turns pink. When Hsia Yü describes machinic translation as the “primal crime scene of a linguistic murder,” her tone is ecstatic: with “a rush of adrenalin,” the poet is dazzled, “stoned”–“it set my head whirling” (“Poetry Interrogation”). Smitten, Hsia proclaims that she has found the one-“Yes, this must be the word noise I’ve been looking for!” The color that translation brings to the white noise therefore also indicates an evolution (local adaptation?) of poetics that outgrows the obsession for a universal, atonal language in pursuit of minimalist purification, to a hybrid tongue of conviviality in the midst of the information revolution.
 
The lyricism in this excessive romantic love with the translation machine returns us to the primary reference of the book: the Net. Pink Noise can be seen as a realistic representation of cyberspace because the web is not only the medium but also the form of the book itself, reflecting such cybernetic relationality: the paradoxical combination of layered shadows and transparency (see Fig. 1 below). Its narrative, too, from the seemingly chaotic chance selection (an oxymoron indeed), is astonishingly readable. More strikingly, generated from the machine are lines of sentimental narratives full of confessional accounts, despite constant glitches, incongruence, and compulsive repetitions. Put allegorically, aren’t the paradoxical and melodramatic colorings of Pink Noise a vivid representation of the romantic possibilities in the age of “digital (un)reason”? In this light, the postmodernism in Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise is not only a formalist play with signifiers but also a complex deep play with the problems of translation, trans-lationality, and cybernetic conviviality.
 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Hsia Yü, Pink Noise, Image from Drunken Boat (Bradbury).

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission of the author.

 

 
In what language can one speak of love in the age of the deterritorializing Machine? Or, to scale back, can we speak of love when the relationship between two languages juxtaposed seemingly in parallels is complicated by gaps, fractures, and glitches? At first sight, Pink Noise presents two national languages: the imperial language of English on the one hand, and the almost anachronistic translation into Chinese on the other. The semi-colonial relationship of the two languages also changes color as the collection turns to prioritize translation–the labor of love. The transformation from the artificial relation between a Western language and the machinic Chinese translation to a dialogic of love is indeed a masterful, poetic translation. In Pink Noise, schizophrenic bilingualism is turned into felicitous noises of romantic encounters (sometimes, “copulation”) whose language is only too familiar to us. In this essay, I begin with the dialogic of two languages to argue that although the juxtaposition of a global/imperial language and its “other” suggests that the context for this work is an postcolonial melancholia, to which Pink Noise obviously responds, the positive and joyful tone of Pink Noise also invites us to look beyond facile binarism to create a third space full of love and new possibilities. Such a process of becoming is translation par excellence. To read the schizophrenic languages of Pink Noise, therefore, one needs to begin with this third space and the process of becoming. Through the lens of translation, we can hear the Babel of global noises in a different way: the Chinese and the English/French here are, to borrow Bhabha’s formulation, almost “national (languages), but not quite.” Or, there is no Language and no bilateral relationship between two languages. In the web of heteroglossic noises, both the colonial and the other languages become the new possibilities–the being that is other than itself.
 

I. Dialogic of Love: Weblish Meets Translationese

 
Does one read in two languages?–Manuals, for example, often offer multiple languages, but we hardly go beyond the one that is most intimate to us. Therefore, when a poetry collection like Pink Noise professes to present parallel poems in two languages, we begin with caution lest we fall into the deceptive premise of likeness, analogy, and parallelism. On the one hand, randomly solicited lines from the modern monster of endless trivialities, the Internet, become these Western poems of melodramatic pseudo-narrative. On the other, the Chinese poems disrupt and complicate this melodramatic grand narrative of digital globalization. Pink Noise is both a parody of and commentary on the expansive virtual space that increasingly encloses the public sphere and encroaches on the untenable public-private divide–Taiwan boasts more than fifteen million Internet users, more than two thirds of its population (Wang). The promise of the book comes from such a bipolar parole: enacted by the crowdedness of words and the overlapping of letters and characters, the blurred signifiers as fetish objects become a ready metaphor of cybernetic relationality in which the speaking subject and her or his object, the enunciator and the addressee, or, the lover and the beloved, are constantly deterritorialized (Fig. 2).
 

 

 

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Fig. 2.

Pink Noise Table of Contents.

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

 
The book’s doubleness at the level of national languages is doubled again at the narrative level. A unique poetic emerges from its juxtaposition of the machine and the speaking subject. In contrast to the futurist hope for technocratic reason generally found in hypertext internet poetry, Pink Noise is almost old-fashioned in that it appears to be less interested in the technology than in the heterglossia of a common speech that the Net has the potentiality to offer. Much like T.S. Eliot’s intertextual and interpersonal referencing in The Waste Land, Pink Noise aims to “return [poetry] to common speech”: “Every revolution in poetry is apt to be . . . a return to common speech” (qtd in Perloff 29). In Pink Noise, the English poems are noticeably lucid, readable, and grammatical. That (partial) transparency paradoxically results from the practice of citations: each line in the English poems is a quotation, or a combination of quotations, mostly from anonymous online sources. The streaming of citations is no longer the modernist evolution from “Image,” “Word-Image” to Meta-language,” but can perhaps more properly be called a parody of ordinary English.⁴ The mundane moments one spends cruising the web are a “brokenhearted time,” as the first poem in the collection allegorically mourns/moans:
 

How fucking creepy is that?
So different and sweet
A promise awaits us
At the limits of the mystical love
In the bright, shining, god-like glow
If we must die
We will need those rhyming skills
Some people are born with
Others develop

 
Outside, sleet is falling
And there’s a dull pain of festive hangover everywhere
If we must die
We can be comfortable ensconced at the center of an admiring crowd
We’re too apathetic to stop
To hold back the feeling
That real life is happening somewhere else

 

What are the rhyming skills, if not the “double-talk” that is both the online common speech and poetic simulacra of such everyday intercourse? The poetic “montage” in the second stanza–“Outside, sleet is falling/ And there’s a dull pain of festive hangover everywhere”–can be read as the fruit of such unique rhyming skills. The comic-tragic narrative of the poem creates a defamiliarizing effect that is at once banal and poetic.

 
As in other Western poems in the collection, the tone of the poem is almost lyrical, its narrative almost linear and progressive, but not quite–there are gaps and glitches in the story the poem tries to tell. For example, how is the “promise” (line 3) which is “so different and sweet” (2), or the “mystical love” (4) each related to the “sleet” (10), the “festive hangover” (11) and “an admiring crowd” (14)? Does the poem conjure up a scene, a landscape, an imagery, or just a mood stereotypically attached to our impression of such-and-such a scene? If the poem is “about” the non-representable field of the virtual space, where do these amorphous, hazy and fragmented scenic or spatial references lead us? Our reading of the poem requires that we conceive of the text not as a representation of a distant scene or object but the Image itself. “In the sphere of the Virtual–of the digital, the computer, integral calculus–nothing is representable,” Jean Baudrillard writes. “It is not a ‘scene’, and there is neither distance nor a critical or aesthetic gaze: there is total immersion. . .” (77). Pink Noise‘s narrative is the product of such virtual reality. Our googlized brain is plugged to the text-image in such a way that the glitches and gaps in the poetic imagery no longer demand the vigorous decoding process we use when we are reading a symbolic or modernist poem. At the same time, the immanence is porous as “we” (line 16) constantly feel that “real life is happening somewhere else” (19). By making cyberspace the overarching referent, the assemblage of artificial sentences becomes a poem that arrogates a narrative, an Idea, an Image. If there are gaps and glitches in the narrative, they do not really disrupt its message as long as one reads the poem the way one browses the web. The “online streaming” is a simulacrum rather than the actual act of writing;⁵ its language is no longer English but netlish, weblish, or webonics. If such a language seems to be shadowy and parasitic, the poem does not show any anxiety or nostalgia for the missing origin. On the contrary, its ending suggests that the ambiguous in-between space allegorized by its uncanny parody of English is a “non-place”–a utopia— worth dwelling upon. In this way, the pseudo- or quasi-narrative of such poems reads like a commentary on the specific time-space of their unique production. What the citational practice in Pink Noise challenges is no longer the hegemonic powers of the original but the need for mediation between the seemingly incompatible ideas of transparency and depth, superficiality and palimpsestic textuality, and natural speech and its uncanny and often stigmatized other, translation.
 
This allegorical grand narrative of the global culture of the information revolution is subverted by the introduction of a radically heterogeneous language–the Chinese “translation,” or Translationese. Let us look at the poem again, this time in its schizophrenic bilingual form:
 

“Brokenhearted time and ordinary daily moment”

 
How fucking creepy is that?
So different and sweet
A promise awaits us
At the limits of the mystical love
In the bright, shining, god-like glow
If we must die

 

 
We will need those rhyming skills
Some people are born with
Others develop

 

 
Outside, sleet is falling
And there’s a dull pain of festive hangover everywhere
If we must die
We can be comfortably ensconced at the center of an admiring crowd

 

 
We’re too apathetic to stop
To hold back the feeling
That real life is happening somewhere else

 

 
“令人心碎的時代和普通每日片刻＂

 

 
怎樣性交是蠕動那?
是不同和甜
承諾等待我們
在神秘愛的限額
在明亮，發光，似神的煥發
如果我們必須死

 

 
我們將需要那些押韻的技能
某些人是出生與
其它人顯現出

 

 
外面，雨夾雪落
並且有歡樂宿酒愚鈍的痛苦到處
如果我們必須死
我們可能舒適地被安置在
敬佩的人群的中心
我們太無動於衷以致於不能終止
暫掛感覺
真正的生命發生在其它的地方

 

 
Readers ingrained in the sense-making of the English narrative will find the Chinese a complete loss in translation. There is no “loyalty to the original” to speak of, which is all the more striking because the collection makes a persistent claim for love and romance. The lack of fidelity also suggests that the sense of the Chinese poems lies elsewhere than at the semantic level, as the love of translation takes us beyond the scene of monogamous or nationalistic commitments. Translation is first and foremost a practice of becomings. Yet in the history of translingual practices in a postcolonial context, translation is indeed a schizophrenic process: On the one hand, it is wrought with struggles and ideological clashes–what to translate, and how, is obviously a matter of ideological choice rather than of accident.⁶ On the other, as is already made clear in Hsia Yü’s exuberant remarks on the “discovery” of the translating machine, a translation in a colonial context is a love-object that is at once alienating and defamiliarized as well as familiar and intimate. “The books that illuminated my youth were by and large translations,” Hsia Yü says (“Poetry Interrogation”). The sense of tenderness for the machine translation that Hsia Yü betrays in her remarks has its root in a cultural memory that is about to be subverted by the advent of the global digital culture. Translation, for postcolonial intellectuals, signifies a loss, but it is also an object of love, as Hsia Yü confesses: “I’ve always loved those sentences that are rendered with a clumsy fidelity, those adorably literal versions that are virtually indifferent to Chinese grammar (which reminds me of Nabokov, that extreme literalist), and all those second- and third-hand translations from Russian via English and Japanese and who knows what else” (“Poetry Interrogation”). Paradoxically, the “weird Chinese” rendered by translation has become a natural language for many intellectuals in Taiwan who grew up reading second-(or third- or even fourth-) hand, sometimes brutally truncated, translation.⁷ The machine is in this case not the culprit responsible for the disappearance of aura but a good object to which one cathects utopian hopes for breaking away from the throes of Martial Law and of traditional orthodoxy on the one hand, and for recreating new language of public discourse on the other (see Benjamin, “The Work of Art”).
 
Although Pink Noise‘s Chinese is more fragmented, atonal and a- or anti-signifying, its signification should be located not at the linguistic level, whether syntactical or semantic, but in its affectivity–the structures of feelings that make such fragmented linguistic representation a lived reality. Surely a sentence like “並且有歡樂宿酒愚鈍的痛苦到處” (Google translator’s back translation reads: “And there are fun places around alcohol dull the pain of”) is defamiliarized, but it is at the same time intimate to (a certain class of) Chinese readers who have grown up part enlightened, part indoctrinated by reading Western culture via awkward Chinese translations. In this way, the Chinese translation becomes a language in its own right–Translationese.
 
Like Latin, Translationese can be seen as a classed language circulated among the educated elites in the modern Chinese context. The translation of “fucking” into “性交” (sexual intercourse) and “creepy” into “蠕動” (crawling) are “luminous mistakes”: the comic effect is that the banality of everyday English is rendered into a pedantic, academic or jargony translation, and it has the benefit of speaking the truth that is so intimate to Taiwanese intellectuals–translation is never a neutral tool but a twisted bridge across linguistic hierarchies, a distorting mirror that reflects two cultures’ mutual misrecognition. Interestingly, in contrast to the more fluid translation of “dynamic equivalence” which is in vogue these days, the machine-generated translation anachronistically reflects the literal translation of 50s and 60s Taiwan, as readers of New Tide Series (Xinchao Wenku) of Zhiwen Publishing Company would readily recognize.⁸ The sense of defamiliarization in the Chinese poems of Pink Noise therefore has an historical as well as an aesthetic dimension. As much as readers are pained by the bad translations because they are too literal, the newness of (Western) thought is inseparable from the foreignness of the language. The literalness of the Chinese poems sends us back to the familiar love and loss in the translation. In contrast to the English poem’s command of narrative, the Chinese counterpart forces the reader to confront the materiality of the word itself, so much so that the sentence becomes a promiscuous carnival event of pornographic word-objects. Offering pure (bodily) senses by means of linguistic nonsense, the Chinese or Translationese sublates the “logonostalgia”–the nostalgia for authentic meaning–in the English poem. Looking back, it is not English or its “Enlightenment” that is the origin of these Chinese poems, but a schizophrenic syntactical disorder such as “怎樣性交是蠕動那?” (literally, “How sexual intercourse is crawling that?”) that becomes the primal scene of translation.
 
Because Pink Noise turns translation into poetry, the question of whether the Chinese translation here fails, or what counts as a successful translation, becomes superfluous. On the level of trans-lingual practice, there are only uneven contrasts. Not only is the quasi-narrative of the English poems deconstructed by the incoherent, machine-generated Chinese translation, but surprisingly, in its radical dramatization and hyperbole (and we are, indeed, more hyperbolic or dramatic, both in the choice of words and in tone and gestures when speaking a foreign language), the Chinese poems also return us from a poetic obsessed with ideas (or ideologies) to the sound and materiality of poetic language. Attending to the sounds, it is intriguing that it is the Western language that is the “natural speech” while Chinese becomes the foreign and hyperbolic–the embodiment of the idea of the poetic per se.⁹ Does the logical reversal become a political rebel that interpellates Hsia Yü to compose the bilingual poems in this collection?–It is, after all, the hazardous Chinese translation that excites Hsia Yü to “write” Pink Noise in the first place.¹⁰ Perhaps, as I suggest above, it is because translation like this exists in the cultural memory and is therefore loved as a lost object of love; or, perhaps the hyperbolic and radically fragmented Chinese is potentially more poetic because modern (i.e., vernacular, free-versed) Chinese poetry has often been presumed a foreign import.
 
In any case, the attempt to close-read the Chinese poems runs into stumbling blocks because no narrative holds up despite the richness of its poetic fragments. Even the commonplace enough title of the poem, “I am an expert in nothing,” for example, becomes a syntactical disorder–“我是關於沒有什麼的一位專家,” or “I’m not an expert on the,” according to the Google translator. The entire poem reads:
 

English

 
Yes, please send me a biweekly
Newsletter filled with diets
Workouts and weight loss
Secrets, yes, please send me
Special offers, promotions
Coupons and free
Samples from the sponsors
Yes, I’ll answer the questions below
To determine my eligibility for this
Study, if I’m not searching
For myself I’ll answer these questions
On behalf of the person
For whom I’m searching
All information that I enter will remain
Private, I’ll want to give it time
To brew
Yes, technology
Is a beautiful thing
 

Chinese¹¹

 
是，請寄發我雙週
時事通訊被裝載飲食
鍛鍊和減重
祕密，是，請寄發我
特價優待，促銷
樣品從贊助商
樣品從贊助商
是，我將答覆問題如下
確定我的適用性為這項
研究，如果我不尋找
我自己我將答覆這些問題
代表人員
我尋找
所有資訊我進入將保留
專用，我將要想給它時刻
釀造
是，技術
是一件美好的事

 

On the level of cross-cultural or trans-lingual contrasts, the poem turns the materiality of language into the construction of historicity. While the English poem seems to evoke Molly Bloom’s monologue from the end of Ulysses and so implicitly coalesces the modern world of commercialization with pornographic female sexuality, the Chinese translation turns the respiratory exclamation into rhythmic breaks. The question–“How does one read senseless translation as poetry?”–could be extremely suggestive as it relentlessly demands that readers ask: On what criteria does Hsia Yü make her choice of words and sentences (in Chinese)? The distortion of syntax in this case is not so much designed to stimulate multiple significations as to foreground each semantic segment in a way that gives primacy to their sound and rhythmic properties. In written and vernacular forms, Chinese language is more collagiste than layered, as words are made of characters that can be combined in a patchwork manner. In contrast to the linear structure of Western languages like English, in Chinese semantic segments hinge on each other relatively loosely, not as a chain but as a chess board, so that to read Chinese is like “perceiving” a picture–one has to take its totality in at once. The Chinese poem of “I am an expert in nothing” interestingly shifts the reader’s focus from a linear and transparent semantics to a kind of musicology of the Chinese language: because of the distortion, one is compelled to read the patched-together, unlayered Chinese sentences differently, accentuating the rhythmic variation in the length of each segment, which is roughly repeated at the sentence (vertical) level of the poem–wo-shi(我是)●
kuan-yu(關於)●meiyo-sheme(沒有什麼)● di(的)● yiwei-zhuanjia (一位專家). On the vertical level, although the poem consists of only one stanza, its structure can be broken up into five parts, each opening with an exclamation, “yes” (是), except the second part, which only has one line, where the “yes” is planted in the middle.¹² Read as playing with rhythm and musicology, the Chinese poem’s asignifying aspect turns the dominant and hegemonic reading of modern poetry (both in Chinese and in English) around. While critics are drawn increasingly to read the idea, ideology, and narrative of modern poetry, the rendering nonsensical paradoxically returns poetry to primal musicology. The joy of the dance of the tongue rebels against the clichés of lack of meaning or of originality. Perhaps, because this machinic translation gives poetry new life by detaching us from the tyranny of meaning to approximate the dynamism of sounds and rhythm–as one line of the previously quoted poem reads, “We will need those rhyming skills”–here in reading Pink Noise we find our poetic endeavors to be completely saturated with infatuation, romance, and love.

 
Spinning the two national languages around into a dialogic of love, Pink Noise does not fall into facile binary oppositions. Instead, the contrast of the two constantly spins to become something new. This new third space, therefore, points us to the conjoining middle, the knot that weaves together the two seemingly opposite ends. The poetic of translation in Pink Noise suggests that one should not reduce the power of interpellation to brain-washing, for it is through the gradual process of incorporating the uncanny, monstrous, alien object and the affective investment, from frustration to tender feeling of intimacy, that the otherwise provincialized subject can be de-/re-territorialized and become open to the hailing of a foreign voice. Here, the positive, constructive potentialities of translation as differential supplements overwrite the (post-)modernist play of opacity and indeterminacy: it is less interesting to try to decipher these arcane and absurd constructions of the sentence than to contrast the two languages in order to be shocked by translation’s power to produce, the power of becoming. This suggests that the point of departure of the book is none other than the middle ground of conjoining, intersection, and fusion. The two languages are thrown there to evoke the eerie third space which is neither the so-called “source text” nor the “target language” but the shadowy middle where the chance encounter–or the flip side of it, the pornography–takes place (Fig. 3):
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 3.

Dialogic of Love¹³

 

 
Let us look at the poem, “Brokenhearted time and ordinary daily moment” again, this time turning to its additional third dimension. Its seemingly binary structure calls for an absent third, not written in either language but allegorically forged in the virtual space where the two languages felicitously “copulate”:
 

English Original

 
How fucking creepy is that?
So different and sweet
A promise awaits us
At the limits of the mystical love
 

Original Translation

 
怎樣的性交是蠕動那?
很不同和甜
承諾等候我們
在神祕愛的限額
 

Back Translation

 
How is sexual intercourse crawling?
Very different and sweet
Promises await us
at the credit limit of the mystical love
¹⁴

The reading of these bilingual poems is hardly a “loss in translation.” The first stanza of the poem demonstrates a dynamic difference: while the English part reads like a romantic narrative, the Chinese “equivalent” has a pornographic feel, properly spiced with machinic apathy, as if sense and sensuality, love and lust, or cheesy pathos and industrial indifference were only two sides of the same coin. These contradictory flavors turn out to be a great mix. When “the limit of mythical love” becomes the “credit limit,” it is as if love in a hyper-mechanic society becomes a product for purchase–who is to say that the “bad translation” does not mean what it says? That the signifier is blissfully ignorant of its signified, when “love” (in English) is conveniently translated as “sex” (in Chinese)?

 
It is of course perverse to find a pornography of sense in the dialogic of two languages, but perhaps it is the perversity of imperial/global bilingualism that Pink Noise audaciously brings us that calls for such a perverse process of signification. This is also to suggest that central to the project of Pink Noise is a kind of significant nonsense. In the sense that the English poems parody the nonsensicalness of on-line and everyday small talk, and that the Chinese counterparts embody the obscurantism of an imported language, Pink Noise critiques such nonsense by mimicking, repeating or becoming that nonsense per se.¹⁵ In the following, I want to suggest two different but mutually constructive ways to read such nonsense. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, nonsense lies precisely at the productive voided center of transference/translation. While the romantic undertone of Pink Noise begs the questions of objecthood and relationality, I suggest that nonsense here also points to the common sense of the virtual multitude and to the connectivity that Pink Noise comes to represent. To reexamine the dialogic of two languages, I turn to psychoanalysis to ask: If translation emerges from nonsense, what is the object of translation that delivers us the sense and signification? If the object in psychoanalysis is marked by signs of irretrievable loss, what, then, accounts for the joyous celebration of translation that raises nonsense to the dignity of poetry in Pink Noise?
 

II. The Alienation of Virtual Nonsense: From Lack to Love

 
The relationship between the original poem and its translation is similar to that of the Subject and its Other, or Being and Meaning, as in Lacan’s graph of alienation.¹⁶ In Lacan’s structure, the supposed reciprocity between the Subject and the Other, or the one-to-one correspondence between Being and Meaning, collapses into non-meaning in the confrontation between the two opposites. The signification of the poems in Pink Noise emerges neither from the English/Netlish, nor from the Chinese/Translationese, but from the “non-meaning” or “nonsense” of the third space, which is the field of translation par excellence.
 
I turn to Lacan’s psychoanalysis in the reading of Pink Noise because it is often too easy to espouse poetic nonsense playfully and to bypass an interpretation of the signification of nonsense. Lacan’s insistence on a “singular interpretation,” i.e., the psychoanalytic interpretation, can be helpful if we want to read beyond the anarchism of signifiers and nihilism of meanings. Psychoanalysts constantly need to wrestle with the meaning of nonsensical slips or inconsistencies. As Lacan’s famous example–“Your money or your life?”–shows, although the choice suggested by the “or” here is absurd (so the meaning of the sentence collapses), it is false to conclude that the dissymmetry and lack of reciprocity between the two parts of the sentence entails the nihilism of meanings per se, or conversely, that interpretation is open to all meanings. Lacan insists that there is one interpretation: “[i]nterpretation is a signification that is not just any signification. . . . It has the effect of bringing out an irreducible signifier” (250; emphasis added). Although this is not the place to enter Lacan’s complicated elaborations on the “irreducible signifier” (in Seminar XVII), I bring up Lacan’s unique sense of “interpretation” to caution against a rushed universal theory that celebrates the liberation of meanings, which lands us in what Lacan might call the university discourse (see The Other Side of Psychoanalysis).¹⁷ Indeed, the master signifier, while still situated in the analysand’s speech, generates a web of desire-production so that the interpretation of its meaning is never a passive decoding of symbols which supposedly can run wild but, as Freud puts it, a matter of construction (see “Constructions in Analysis”). Interestingly, Lacan describes such an interpretation or construction as a process of translation: “this ongoing translation of an unconscious that is first of all the unconscious of the other” (Transference XIII: 3).¹⁸ Translation for Lacan has to do with interpreting the irreducible signifier on which is founded the dialectics of the desire of the other.
 
In Lacan’s topography of alienation, a revision of his theory of the mirror stage, the relationship between Subject and Other, or Being and Meaning, breaks away from what he calls the “prescientific truth” or imaginary meaning which is founded on fantasies of wholesomeness. Instead of harmony, we have discordance at the heart of psychoanalytic truth; instead of the whole, the hole; and, as the graphs evolve in later Lacan, instead of signifiers, objet a–the object-cause of desire. The centralization of nonsense is significant in that, out of the conjoining/intersecting middle of the two separate entities whose relationship is marked by dissymmetry and lack of reciprocity, there emerges not the Subject nor the Object but objet a, which becomes the anchoring point of signification.¹⁹ In terms of cross-cultural translation, the virtual/psychic space of objet a arises particularly when the dissymmetries between two linguistic systems are marked: non-signal noises, nonsense, slips, blunders, inconsistencies and the like. The third space which Lacan calls transference-love is therefore the space of (un-)translatability. When Walter Benjamin explains that “The word Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same,” (“The Task” 105), or when George Steiner asks, “labor we may, bread will never wholly translate pain. What, in English, French or Italian is Heimat?” (152), or to return to the Taiwanese context, when one evokes the opposition between yams and taros, we are reminded that a faithful translation is only a fantasy. To the extent that the aromas of Brot, cheese, yam, taro and das Heimat (home) are untranslatable, or that their translation is sustained by non-meaning, the “thickness” of the characters in the Chinese translation is perhaps the most effective representation of trans-lational (instead of relational) desire: this is an age whose virtual reality is a bilingualism or heterglossia from which one cannot escape but to which one can never fully belong.
 
Bruce Fink extrapolates Lacan’s graph of Subject and Other into the dialogic of jouissance. As long as Lacan’s topography of alienation is a reformulation of the Cartesian subject, there are two subjects in Lacan: the subject of signifier and the subject of jouissance. On the other hand, as later Lacan puts a greater emphasis on the subject of jouissance, interpretation also gravitates towards the other jouissance, the excess, or the beyond of phallic jouissance. In other words, signification becomes saturated with sexuation. To translate: meaning in the pre-psychoanalytic discourse has always involved the fantasy of harmony, the most primal form of which is the harmonious copulation of the Mind and the Body. The psychoanalytic interpretation has to go beyond such an imaginary, fantastic, or “pornographic” signification to foreground the discordance, the “hole,” the “falling out” that takes us toward the other jouissance. Fink suggests that the most we can say about such other jouissance is that “it corresponds to ‘making love,’ as opposed to sexual intercourse,” which, according to Fink’s reading of Lacan’s Seminar XX, is “akin to poetry” (Lacan to the Letter 162). Fink’s remark, bringing together love and poetry with the same stroke to antagonize love and sex, offers an interesting perspective from which to read Pink Noise‘s love for two languages. Central to the psychoanalytic interpretation is the jouissance that results from the encounter of two languages–or, in Samuel Huntington’s polemic terms, the “clash of civilizations.” As formulated in Lacan’s graph, the two languages are also structured in a way that the (lack of) relationship (or relationship) between the bipartite entities revolves around the middle, the third space: the non-meaning, nonsense, the place of the objet a (in Lacan), or of pink noise (in Hsia Yü). For psychoanalysis, however, jouissance is the Doppelgänger of lack. As Fink puts it, the other jouissance has its most common manifestation in jealousy, or jalouissance (jealouissance) (Lacan to the Letter 146): Someone must be enjoying themselves more than I am or, as Žižek elaborates in “Enjoying Your Nation as Yourself,” this other jouissance is the fuel of paranoid nationalism and homophobia against our national or racial others, who we believe to be stealing our enjoyment because they have other enjoyments that we do not know of or have (201-211).
 
Indeed, in reading Pink Noise there is a sense that something is left out by the juxtaposition of the two languages: on the one hand, the nonsense in the collage of banal prose of the foreign language; on the other, the non-meaning in the obscure, lofty and stuffy translation. The jouissance in the Chinese and Anglophone readers’ celebratory reception of Pink Noise disguises such lack, a unique sense of failure that a reader of two empowered languages is destined to encounter: both Chinese and Anglophone readers read the form of bilingualism without reading its two languages.²⁰ It is as if the poems become the object or object-cause which is the book itself; as one of the poems says, “words fail me,” which in Chinese becomes “words do not pass/penetrate me” (詞未通過我). With the poetry of the poem lost to the jouissance of the form, Pink Noise is either “degraded” to a coffee table item, or “upheld” as a modern Bauhaus-/Ikea-brand object.²¹
 
In the last graph of the other jouissance, what drops out of the encounter of two jouissances can be construed as the soul of the poem, which takes the place of nonsense/non-meaning/sweet-nothings in the dialogic of love. I think this is where the encounter between Pink Noise and psychoanalysis could take us, to the other reality of the (social) virtual. While the psychoanalytic dialectic problematizes the nostalgia for origins, its emphasis on lack is eerily nostalgic. Does the same lingering nostalgia lurk in the spectacular artifice of Pink Noise? Does it propose that a soul falls away from the book’s virtual noises? My reading of Pink Noise is that although the book departs from lack, its promise is also to work against such negativity: the promise of poetry is exactly to translate lack into love, or, in Toni Morrison’s words, into “thick love.” In the following paragraphs, I return to Pink Noise to engage its other dimension, beyond the negativity of lack: the immanent virtuality of the Net as the transforming and transformative public sphere, and the positive reading of becoming “one” (with a lower case “o”) the Net’s multitude makes possible.
 

IV. Virtually Social: The Uneven Contrast of Critical Comparativism

 
In Interventions into Modernist Cultures (2007), Amie Elizabeth Parry reads Hsia Yü’s “underground poetry” to underscore the “workings of neo-colonial knowledge formations” in Hsia Yü’s “microstructures of the everyday” (81). Implicitly addressing the two prevailing interpretations of Hsia Yü’s poetry as postmodern (in Lin Yaode, Meng Fang, and others) and feminist (in Michelle Yeh, Liao Hsian-Hao, Jian Chengjen and many others), Parry sees Hsia Yü’s play with romantic themes and seemingly apolitical fantasy (of air travel, in “Leaving in a Jet Plane,” for example) as gestures of refusal to participate in the discursification of heteronormative sexual morality in the post-Martial Law era on the one hand, and as challenging the seamless account of (Western) modernity as a borderless (united) state on the other.²²
 
If, as Parry suggests, Hsia Yü’s lyricism pretends to rebel reticently against the uneven developments of modernity as experienced in a neo-colonial locale like Taiwan, then Pink Noise can be read as further literalization of the transformation of the public sphere in the global empire of English, and of the flattening power of global capitalism. In a way, the two different narrative modes of the two languages opens up precisely such an alternative space, a space of the “reticent rebel”: the English poems are amazingly readable and have a coherent narrative, in contrast to the Chinese poems, which radiate with poetic epiphanies here and there but whose poetic effects are co-dependent on the radical syntactic jolts that prevent the poems from forming coherent narratives. Yet, instead of reticence, silence, or lack, in Pink Noise these contrasts also bring up something: the noises. Noises, I argue, are not nothing: they are, in the words of social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, the screen, as in Freud’s “screen memory,” of meaningful “signals” (Twenge and Campbell 118).²³
 
So in the poem, “Then, I will realize that it’s really bad or….,” we find colors at the heart of “(uneven) contrast”:
 

Seduced by flowers
She’s not afraid to be bold when
It comes to decorating
“I have this green hutch, from Romania
Late 1800s,” she says. “It’s a great antique piece
It’s a great color, a very bright green
The doors are held together by bent nails. It’s
Fabulous. I have eclectic tastes.
Nothing really goes but it works.”
 

“I have this cobalt blue vase, probably a foot
And a half tall,” she says
“It’s my favorite color and it’s my
Favorite piece
We registered for it for my wedding
And I got it
Right now it’s in the foyer when you walk in. My favorite
Thing is to put intense, colored flowers
Red or orange, in it for
The Contrast.”

While speaking of the “contrast”–one can understand it in light of Parry’s “critical comparativism”–the poem quickly turns to deconstruct itself, for underlying the contrast there seems to be only nothing. In the poem, a female character is engaged in the mundane activity of decorating something with a flower arrangement. As if to comment on the role of poetry caught in consumerist culture between the lofty “high” art of poetry and the “low” of popular decoration, the poem allegorically asserts that the frivolous and inconsequential–colors, tastes, small objects–are only posited “for contrast.” Although the sentences make grammatical sense, at the same time because of the lack of a meaningful event or action, the poem seems to be about nothing, or nothing but the “intangible things” such as colors or contrasts. “Nothing really goes but it works”–colors are also the intangible something begotten from nothing, as the intangible Internet generates the poems in Pink Noise.

 
The rhetoric of the everyday not only serves as the “uneven contrast” of (colonial) modernity; implicitly, it also brings up the larger social context of virtuality qua sociality. Like the deployment of the everyday (and potentially philosophical) word “nothing” which surfaces in many poems in the collection, the overflowing adjectives, often expressive of emotions, are the “bright” and “fabulous” colors that double-talk or, as Lacan puts it, “half-talk” (mi-dit) between something and nothing:²⁴ they seem to be metaphorical of the inhuman or posthuman connections on the Net which are “Exotic, hypnotic… metaphorical” (Poem #16) but that are too mundane and trivial to be worth poetic breath. Poem #19, “Discover how well her passions mesh” begins with: “This is a stupid document/ It is meaningless drivel.” The meshing of “passions” and a “stupid document” describes the new relationality–or translationality–of the Internet age: the impersonal yet intimate connectivity that is no longer mediated through a third term. By alluding to cyber-reality, the poem runs an “integrated circuit” and becomes self-referential (Baudrillard 79). The poet seems to mock her own creation when the poem continues: “That she does not expect any of the several billion people on her planet to/Actually read,” but to this point the partisanship of the English/Weblish poem no longer satisfies us–we read on to its Chinese/Translationese doublet, only to find that the meaning of “an unending series of unsatisfying compromises” has become its opposite, “不滿意妥協無止境的系列” (not satisfied with the compromises [of] an unending series). The (English) poem ends with a pseudo-philosophical/pop-psychology quest for insight with which to “get past” the “wild and flashy exterior” to “what’s actually on the inside.” But the mirroring of the English and the Chinese can hardly sustain such a binary opposition. There is no telling when the back-and-forth movement between the two languages would produce peculiar “contrasts” that invite “(reticent) rebels,” but it is clear that out of the mundane “nothing(ness),” we get something. Maybe just the flowers. Maybe not even anything as substantial as flowers. Maybe what we get and what the contrast has to offer is only the blue, the orange, the pink–the flood of everyday, inconsequential decoratives–that describe the insubstantial (non-)being in the virtual multitude of our new social reality.
 
With this, let me return to the poem, “I am an expert in nothing.” I have demonstrated that the English and Chinese poems call for different reading practices; the contrast between them produces the historicity that is embedded in both the colonial past and the virtual present of (mechanic) translation/becoming. Paying attention to the poem’s Weblish, this time I show that, the sense of loss notwithstanding, there is a new object in the poem and in Pink Noise as a whole. The object is precisely the “stupid and meaningless document” of the Internet. In this poem, we learn that the expert–“I,” as in “i-Expert”–masters the nothingness of the secrets and private information found in “biweekly newsletters filled with diets/ Workouts and weight loss.” To whom does he/she owe the pleasure? To none other than the new technology of the Internet–“Yes, technology/Is a beautiful thing.” Remember that the English poems are in fact written in a second-hand language, first a semi-colonial language and then one that is relayed, indirect speech of anonymous quotations. The romance with technology is double-edged: as the discourse of (Western) modernity, it is flat, smooth, and has a coherent (although banal) narrative; at the same time, it is also striated, porous, and prone to self-destruction. The end of the poem, on the other hand, points to new species of love and to another dimension of the social that has always been in the background of Pink Noise: ever-expanding virtual space and artificial intelligence. Indeed, technology is a beautiful thing.
 
The collection’s twinning of new-agey romance with online connection challenges us to reconsider whether psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies remain the most helpful models for reading objecthood and relationality now. Is there a Subject behind or produced by the “shadowy colors” or “virtual buzzes”? Are the poems parables of love in the age of cybernetic connectivity, which radicalizes and problematizes the already perilous romantic terrain so that love becomes its opposite–the monist autoerotism of the self-indulgence of the subject and the annihilation of the object? From a Lacanian perspective, psychic reality relies on lack that introduces the Symbolic Order, but in the computer, as Žižek explains it, “virtuality, in the sense of symbolic fiction,” collapses (“Civil Society” 43). For Žižek, the Net disrupts the panoptic function of the Symbolic, and that is what constitutes its psychic threat. There is an intriguing slide in Žižek’s account from the psychic virtual to the social virtual, both of which are upheld in the metaphor of the panopticon. Žižek’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the virtual/social implies that the VR of the computer is the disorder of power, which leads simultaneously to the crumbling of the sexual, the fantastical and the psychic.
 
It is interesting to return from Žižek’s argument about lack and negativity to the yes-saying of the poem, “I am an expert in nothing.” The poem’s tone, which is remarkably lacking in resistance, brings up and ties together two aspects of the psychoanalytic virtual: the fantasy of sexual talk and the submission to the gaze of the panopticon, both of which Žižek thinks support sexual relations. Read in this light, the second person narrative of the poem as well as the explicit references to commercialization are poignant: it is as if Molly Bloom is shouting yes to the corporate industry behind the ads and getting tremendous enjoyment from it. While entertaining Hsia Yü’s ingenious mise en scène of the personal and the social, as well as of the sexual and the commercial, it becomes increasingly unsettling to read the ending of the poem, “Yes, technology/ Is a beautiful thing,” as ironic. Moreover, while a Lacanian interpretation of virtuality presupposes a “double consciousness,” a critical split that allows the subject (or subject, the barred subject) to reflect on its formation, both identity and subjectivity have a different feel through the intimate second person narrative. The “I” as well as the addressed “you” are not identified, therefore non-discrete and un-singular. While most hidden stanzas are prompted by “yes,” it is also interesting to note some exceptions: secrets in lines 5 to 8 (“Secrets, yes, please send me/Special offers, promotions/Coupons and free/samples from the sponsors”) study in lines 10 to 14 (“Study, if I’m not searching/ For myself I’ll answer these questions/On behalf on the person/For whom I’m searching”), and private in lines 15 and 16 (“Private, I’ll want to give it time/To brew”). Then the poem returns to the “yes” narrative and ends with “Yes, technology/Is a beautiful thing.” Whether the evocations of private core and personal identities are ironic is moot; they seem to be too enamored of the act of becoming to even keep track of their own identities. It is also important to remember that in Pink Noise, English/Weblish is also an “identity” joyfully deconstructed by the Chinese/Translationese other. When “technology” meets translation, rather than returning to the black hole of lack as the origin of virtual reality and identity, it inadvertently turns into “skill” (技術), recalling the “rhyming skills” in an earlier discussed poem, and suggesting that, after all, poetry (and love?) is a transformative skill that creates something from nothing.
 
Ultimately, the romance of poetry and bilingual practice has to come from the intimate and radical act of reading. My argument in this essay is that Pink Noise is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, hence resistant to any monopoly of interpretation. It is, nevertheless, joyful and not melancholic or nostalgic for the collapse of symbolic power. The poetry here hardly imposes a moral obligation to interpret. Although I do not propose the interpretation of Pink Noise (as Lacan suggests of a psychoanalytic interpretation), I also want to argue that unlike the Lacanian formulation of love and postcolonial dialectic of power, both of which are embedded with negativity for which lack becomes the ultimate metaphor, Pink Noise‘s dance with the Machine is positive and completely without negativity. Pink Noise is an open invitation for readers to re-late and trans-late. It is up to the readers whether we acknowledge, accept, or turn away from such an open invitation.
 

V. Conclusion: The Virtual Multitude

 
I want to accept the poem’s invitation by returning to Pink Noise to suggest that it is in the act of reading, and furthermore, reading the language of the foreign and the everyday (nonsense), that we can reinvent the emerging virtual social, and transform its fundamental lack into the multitude of love and poetry. The poems in Pink Noise seem to suggest such a reading trajectory; as one of the poems says, “Things seem to get worse before they get better” (Fig. 4):
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Poem #32. “Things seem to get worse before they get better.”

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

 
How do things get better as they seem to get worse initially? “The people are dead” and “the things are scattered,” the poem tells us in the beginning–“nothing subsists.” The narrative then zooms in to an undecipherable landscape where “She poised herself on the balance beam gracefully” and “he waited with his fingers posed over the keys.” The scene does not so much announce the “death of the subject” as give us a sense of undistinguished personae, of private selves which are impersonal, un-singular. Moreover, because the lines are drawn from different sources on the internet, we do not know if the “he” or the “she” in the poem refers to the same person. The poem talks about a distant temporality, “a long distant past,” and gives a wasteland-like feel of apocalypses: “nothing subsists/ After the people are dead/after the things are broken and scattered.” But its tone is distinctively different from T.S. Eliot’s messianic or apocalyptic melancholia; it celebrates “works [that] are born as if out of the void.” Among the ambiguous referents to the person/persona and the world/void, two indexes of humanity to the body parts stand out–the fingers and the hand. Although streamlined as a narrative, the poem can be read only by adding a chain of associations from its diverse elements: “balance beam” (signifying harmony?), fingers on “the keys” (roman à clef?), “the ruins” and the notion that “everything vanishes,” “ripe graphic fruit” and the hand as the “obedient instrument” of “a remote will.” The poem interestingly reflects the way one reads the book in general: that is, manually, with a hand, which is autonomous in the sense that it is not controlled by a humanist core but by a “remote will.” The inhuman yet intimate “hand job” is crucial because the book is produced in a way that would be unreadable unless one were to add, say, a piece of paper, to separate each poem from the others. The adding is therefore a subtraction at the same time. Or, to evoke Wittgenstein’s language game, the imperative to “add 1” functions like the cut in Lacanian psychoanalysis that produces the lack constitutive of the emergence of the symbolic order, except that literally adding 1 upends the negativity and turns it into rosy representations of sheer positivity. By adding one more language and one more poem, one creates new poetic space in which the streamlined narrative gives way to defamiliarized (exotic?) fragmentations, which, on the other hand, bear the old poetic fruit of musicology (see Fig. 5 below). Things do get better even when formal fragmentation and linguistic alienation initially seem to make them get worse.
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Poem #32. “事似乎得到壞在它們得到更好.”

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

 
The poem’s message–“Things seem to get worse before they get better”–relies on the conceit of the game that by adding the Chinese translation one only adds to the felicity of poetry. To add the Chinese is also to return the poem to its original form of palimpsestic transparency (see Fig. 6 below). The “balance” to which the English poem alludes is figured materially when one translates and adds one more linguistic dimension to the poem. By multiplying, the poetic lines on the one hand lose their decipherability; on the other, by losing their individual identity they gain a new life–they become pink noise (see Fig. 7 below).
 

 

 

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Fig. 6.

“Add 1”–adding the “translation” to the “original.”

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by
permission.

 

 

 

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Fig. 7.

Multiplication.

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

Admittedly, both playing the game and adding 1 are metaphors of reading, that is, of how meaning and understanding work. I evoke Wittgenstein’s example of the game “add N” in his Philosophical Investigations here because the tenet of ordinary language philosophy is that meaning and human life are fundamentally connected even in the face of nonsense, whims, mistakes, and noises (143-205). The famous Wittgenstein dictum that there is no private language is apt: the binary opposition between human and machine comes largely from the picture held by the sceptics that (human) understanding is a mysterious, inner mental process that takes painful decoding and is especially vulnerable to gridlocks of communication. With the concept of language games, Wittgenstein shows how mistakes are possible, for example, when one understands the rule to “add N” differently. Does the “alternative interpretation” pass? Or does it fail because it fails to faithfully represent what the rule-makers have in mind? Eventually, the felicity of playing the game involves understanding the rules, not through some mysterious and complicated process of transporting a picture locked in the addresser’s mind but by grasping its meaning in a flash. Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy shows that the meaning of the word is neither in the mind of the addresser, nor in the representation of the addressee, but is in its use.

 
As I turn from the initial fascination for Pink Noise‘s transparent form and undecipherable noises to the physical book and to the material presentation of poetry, I am inspired by Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy. There is no “alien” language, as Wittgenstein famously says. Although Pink Noise seduces us to read the new formidable machinic language as a sign of the end of human agency, Wittgenstein’s language games help me to re-enter Hsia Yü’s poetics for an alternative interpretation. If reading Pink Noise, as many of Hsia Yü’s critics and readers have argued, is to play the linguistic game, then to play a game is also to understand the rules (grammar, laws)–to follow, distort, appealing to, or discard them. The machine itself is neither dogmatic nor anarchistic. In fact, the machine is none other than the sum total of the human. At the end of his discussions of the game “add N,” Wittgenstein uses the machine to symbolize the ordinariness (in contrast to “queerness”) of meaning that is always present (in contrast to “deferred,” “effected,” or “apocalyptic”). “We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine,” Wittgenstein says (66). The action of the machine, as meaning in human life, is in fluid movement and can never be fixed; at the same time, its possibilities are always present. This does not say that the machine contains all the possibilities, or that its future movements are predetermined from the start–this would lead to a robotic, “dead” machine. Language, like the metaphor of the machine, is full of possibilities and potentials, yet the richness of such possibilities can only be truly appreciated when we begin with the presentness of their use (Wittgenstein 77-79).
 
Keeping the presentness of the richness of ordinary language in mind, my reading of Pink Noise is eventually a literal and literary one. I take Pink Noise‘s message about the clichés of love to be indicative of the poetic of translation in the new age of global connectivity. In reading Pink Noise, the sporadic yet convivial collage of romantic elements–“luck/運氣,” “contagion/傳染,” “risk/風險,” “superstition/迷信,” etc.–grows, as if to evidence the message in one of the poems: “This has been sent to you for good luck.” By multiplying languages, by adding one(self) to the process of reading, the book professes to be the talisman of such “good luck”–the token of love, which is not different from infection or contagion, as the poem says: “Sometimes there’s nothing that feels quite so good as being bad/ A lot of love results from an infection by other love/有時有沒 什麼感到相當很好作為是壞/很多愛起因於傳染由於其他愛.” The machinic aspect of meaning-production does not prevent us from understanding the common speech of love, nor does it require its infection to become something radically new, and so limit it. Just as the virtual/social is linked to the Machine, so at the same time the Machine is not the antinomy of the human and the ordinary. As long as the process of rendering meaningful implicitly relies on the assumption that there is a human agent who makes choices even amidst machine-generated chaos (i.e., chance), the heartless machine is the poet’s Doppelgänger. One does not have to kill the double in Pink Noise to have a singular interpretation. The poetics of translation is lost when one is tempted to turn, as in the fable of Lot’s wife, to look for the original meaning of the translated words, or to return to the previous life of humanity before the Machine. What Pink Noise presents us is no other than an invitation and a promise. The promise is that the future of poetry and the future of humanity are full of love, as long as one takes the invitation to dive into the great mix of noises and the multitude of nonsense. Such a persistent desire for the new and the unknown is already an old one, but Pink Noise dares the nonsense to repeat it lest the promise of poetry be forgotten in the age of artificial intelligence–
 
“Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk/Do not keep this message.”